A 1988 keynote by Gordon Bell on the history of personal workstations.
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@amoroso It is a great keynote, and to his credit Gordon saw minicomputers making mainframes "extinct" (which isn't precisely true but certainly knocked them off the top of the food pyramid) and saw how Sun was eating DEC's lunch with workstations, and that would lead to PCs eating the workstations. I don't think anyone had phones eating the PC on their bingo card but may be mistaken on that.
@ChuckMcManis Maybe Alan Kay came close to envisioning handheld devices doing most of what PCs did. As for Gordon, his vision was remarkably deep.
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@weekend_editor While you guys were playing with those toys my very first personal workstation was this.
Well... you had a color display before we did?
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Well... you had a color display before we did?
@weekend_editor That's why yours were toys.
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Well... you had a color display before we did?
@weekend_editor @amoroso Probably, but vision was also a topic in the AI lab. I've seen a researcher doing 3d video analysis using a 3640. Night long runs to compute 3d filters over videos. That machine also had a color board, IIRC.
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@weekend_editor @amoroso Probably, but vision was also a topic in the AI lab. I've seen a researcher doing 3d video analysis using a 3640. Night long runs to compute 3d filters over videos. That machine also had a color board, IIRC.
There was (eventually) a color board, which would either do full 32-bit color or pack things into 8-bit color with the colors looked up in a color map.
It was *very* expensive, even the monitor was north of $10k as I recall.
It was geared at Hollywood types, with gen locking and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_and_Stella_in:_Breaking_the_Ice
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There was (eventually) a color board, which would either do full 32-bit color or pack things into 8-bit color with the colors looked up in a color map.
It was *very* expensive, even the monitor was north of $10k as I recall.
It was geared at Hollywood types, with gen locking and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_and_Stella_in:_Breaking_the_Ice
@weekend_editor What timeframe was that? Interlisp-D supported color on secondary displays no later than 1990, but probably not much earlier than a couple of years.
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@weekend_editor What timeframe was that? Interlisp-D supported color on secondary displays no later than 1990, but probably not much earlier than a couple of years.
Late 1984.
Definitely by 1985. That was the year Scientific American had the Mandelbrot set on the cover. I had a color display & color board for some reason, probably because I write a demo for sales. Since I was a physics grad student on hiatus, everybody wanted me to show them how to map the complex plane onto the color display and "do mandelbrots".
That was fun!
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Late 1984.
Definitely by 1985. That was the year Scientific American had the Mandelbrot set on the cover. I had a color display & color board for some reason, probably because I write a demo for sales. Since I was a physics grad student on hiatus, everybody wanted me to show them how to map the complex plane onto the color display and "do mandelbrots".
That was fun!
@weekend_editor I found a couple of Interlisp-D source files for color support timestamped 1986.
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@weekend_editor I found a couple of Interlisp-D source files for color support timestamped 1986.
@weekend_editor The 1983 edition of the Interlisp Reference Manual has a section on color graphics on Xerox 11xx machines.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_1983.pdf#page=576
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@weekend_editor The 1983 edition of the Interlisp Reference Manual has a section on color graphics on Xerox 11xx machines.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_1983.pdf#page=576
@amoroso @weekend_editor very cool, I wonder if there are any infos/images of those machines with a color board & screen?
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@amoroso @weekend_editor very cool, I wonder if there are any infos/images of those machines with a color board & screen?
@symbolics I've never seen a screenshot of Interlisp-D in color. I'm not sure whether the color logo in this AAAI 82 photo is an actual monitor or just a sign.
https://interlisp.org/photos/AAAI82/AAAI82_9_hu_4a14d9fb5d0b6063.jpg