john@minster.york.ac.uk (08/05/87)
Does anyone know where we can obtain an inexpensive, commercially-produced,
fully-programmable, bit-mapped graphics (>= 1024 x 768 monochrome) terminal
with a fast (say Ethernet) interface? A BLIT Mk 2 is what we're really after.
The intended use is for a University student terminal classroom - i.e. they
must be robust, inexpensive, and come as a two box unit (monitor + keyboard).
Suggestions of SUN, Apollo etc. workstations will be ignored (physically too
big, too locked in to manufacturer's cruddy software), as will suggestions of
Atari STs, Macintoshes, IBM-PCs etc (too many boxes, too small a screen, etc).
We'd build our own, but someone else must have beaten us to it, surely!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John A. Murdie "The End of our Foundation is the knowledge
Dept. of Comp. Sci. of Causes, and secret motions of things;
University of York and the enlarging of the bounds of
England Human Empire, to the effecting of all
things possible"
ukc!york!minster!john Francis Bacon, "The New Atlantis", 1627gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (08/08/87)
In article <555153727.14490@minster.york.ac.uk> john@minster.york.ac.uk writes: >Does anyone know where we can obtain an inexpensive, commercially-produced, >fully-programmable, bit-mapped graphics (>= 1024 x 768 monochrome) terminal >with a fast (say Ethernet) interface? A BLIT Mk 2 is what we're really after. There is a 5620 DMD follow-on in the works, about which I cannot say much. My preliminary impression is that it will be what the 5620 should have been. It won't come standard with an Ethernet connector but it can be set up to attach to two hosts simultaneously over 19.2Kb serial ports, and will have expansion hooks that make it likely that a high-speed parallel or Ethernet interface could be added, although then one would have to figure out how to get the layersys operating system to talk to the interface. For more information, watch for an AT&T (formerly Teletype) announcement sometime soon, perhaps in September (just guessing). I'm not sure why you would want an Ethernet interface with one of these anyway -- downloaded interaction control processes can stay resident and give essentially instantaneous response. You can put up an awful lot of graphics information using 19.2Kb encoded graphic (e.g., PostScript) instructions. About the only practical bottleneck I see is in display of semi-random information, but can the eye really take that in at a high rate? Perhaps a discussion of your intended application would be in order.
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (08/18/87)
> There is a 5620 DMD follow-on in the works, about which I cannot say much. > My preliminary impression is that it will be what the 5620 should have been. The thing Doug is talking about is the AT&T 630. Its release is actually overdue, it was supposed to be out by now; apparently it is to be part of a big multi-product announcement and some of the other things are running late. It does look pretty good (except for that wretched amber phosphor -- white is supposed to be coming), and it is said that the price will be sane too. -- Support sustained spaceflight: fight | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology the soi-disant "Planetary Society"! | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry