[TUHS] Origins of the frame buffer device

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> On 8 Mar 2023, at 15:23, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 7:53 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:
>> This also has a relation to the point about what constitutes a "workstation" and one of the comments was that it needs to have "integrated graphics". What is integrated in this historical context -- is it a shared memory frame buffer, is it a shared CPU, is it physically in the same box or just an integrated user experience? It seems to me that it is not easy to delineate. Consider a Vax connected to a Tek raster scan display, a Vax connected to a Blit, Clem’s Magnolia and a networked Sun-1. Which ones are workstations? If shared memory is the key only Clem’s Magnolia and the Sun-1 qualify. If it is a shared CPU only a standalone Sun-1 qualifies, but its CPU would be heavily taxed when doing graphics, so standalone graphics was maybe not a normal use case. For now my rule of thumb is that it means (in a 1980’s-1990’s context) a high-bandwidth path between the compute side and display side, with enough total combined power to drive both the workload and the display.
> 
> I wouldn't try to be too rigid in your terms here. The term
> "workstation" was probably never well-defined; it had more of an
> intuitive connotation of a machine that was more powerful than
> something you could get on the consumer market (like a PC or 8-bit
> microcomputer), but wasn't a minicomputer or mainframe/supercomputer.

Yes, I got a bit carried away there. The point I was trying to make was in context of the wheel of reincarnation, though: if the system is a Vax and a Blit, we could conceptually think of the Blit as an accelerated graphics card for the Vax, having made one full revolution. If this is nonsense, why is the Magnolia different?