Re: A working PDP-11 (almost ... )

[Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>]

At 03:02 PM 6/17/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>In article <3.0.3.32.19980617122934.009cc1f0@pop.infomation.com>,
>    Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>  writes:
>> [...] and people who worked on the first VAX
>> workstation (2 tubes with M68000 display processors and fiber optic lines
>> to an 11/780 -- it wasn't a major success except I think that X-windows got
>> started there) [...]
>
>Rich Thomson here... (I switched subscription addresses to my personal
>account) Where does the vaxstation 8000 fit into this picture?  This
>was the first exposure I had to Evans & Sutherland -- they did the
>graphics architecture/accelerator for the VS 8000.  My understanding
>was that the graphics was great, but that the VS couldn't feed the
>graphics pipeline fast enough to keep it saturated and the product was
>cancelled at DEC.

A couple of people said that the VAXstation with M68000 display processor &
fiber optic link to the VAX was the VAXstation-100, and that some of the
people who worked on it later went to Apollo and a bunch of the hardware
went to MIT Project Athena.  It ate VAXen whole because the VAX did all of
the work twiddling pixels while the M68000 didn't do very much other than
stick the pixels into memory -- poor partitioning of function between the
CPUs.  It's pretty expensive to use an 11/750 as a single-user system and
an 11/780 for 2 users.

Anyway, one person also said that the VAXstation-8000 was a MicroVAX-II
(MicroVAX chip) system, so I'm not surprised that it couldn't keep up with
any graphics hardware that E&S would have designed!

- Aron