masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (Stan Barber, Moderator) (05/03/88)
This is the third of many installments summarizing what happened at the 1988 Annual MUS meeting held in Danvers, MA from Tuesday, April 19th until Thursday, April 21st. Initially, I will summarize those things I personnally took notes on. Any other persons who want to submit summaries, please do so. Also, opinions expressed are obviously mine. Other opinions are welcome. This summary will cover graphics issues. There was no new graphics hardware annouced or shown at this meeting. There were hints at what was coming, but nothing concrete. I will go out on a limb and predict both a new high end graphics product and a new low-end graphics product for the VME bus will be annouced some time this fall. I repeat, no one said this but it was strongly alluded to. These new products will probably have some 3-D primitives built-in. Now, we move to software. The big news is X-Window. There were many discussions of it versus SP-40. Here is some of the news. SP-40 will continue to be supported. X is another way to use the graphics tubes and is not compatible with SP-40. However, you can run both if you have two tubes. You can run SP-40 on one and X on the other. Unfortunately, you have to reboot the system if you want to change one tube over. This OS group was asked to consider dynamically loadable device drivers to avoid this. They said they would put it on the list of things to do. [Hopefully, it is close to the top....] If you have been migrating your code to be compatible with SP-41, you will be able to relink those with out changes to the code to run under X. This product is called XGCL. Also, a manual to help users convert code from SP-40 to X will be available when X ships (or close to that time). It is part of the X product and should be available at no additional charge. X will support the data tablet in addtion to the mouse and will make use of shared memory if both the client and server are on the same computer (this is user selectable on MASSCOMP). This gives MASSCOMP X a significant performance boost. Generally speaking (since it is applications dependent), X performs between 70 and 80% as fast as SP-40 on the GA1000 graphics sub-system. X will available for all MASSCOMP computers 68010-based through 68030-based. Since X is primarily a windowing system and not a graphics system, MASSCOMP is also supplying an X version of GKS. This is NOT the Precision Visuals GKS, but a new product. This should allow complex displays to be made with high-level drawing primitives. The X product is being released on the GA1000 and the GA600 initially. The GA800 product is working well and expected release of this version of X is the fall of this year. This is the end of summary 3. If you were there and you disagree with my statements here, please drop me a line. Stan Barber, Immediate Past President Masscomp Users' Society Moderator of comp.sys.masscomp