[rescue] FS/FTGH: Sun kit

[Richard]

In article <200601162237.k0GMb7p16567 at an.bradford.ma.us>,
    adh at an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker)  writes:

> you forget how old the cg6 family is.

I can't forget what I never knew :-).

> it dates back to about '90
> iirc, and back then 24-bit fbs were -very-rare- and -very-expensive-.
> many highish-end machines back then still had b/w fbs.

I suppose it all depends in which circles you travel.  In 1989/1990, I
was surrounded by people who were regularly using 24-bit frame
buffers.  HP workstations, Apollo workstations, SGI workstations, DEC
workstations, Sun workstations and E&S workstations in the labs I used
were almost entirely 24-bit frame buffers.  (The ESV I had on my desk
from 1989 through 1993 had an 88-bit frame buffer; 24-bits double
buffered, 32-bits Z, 8-bits window id.)

Of course, I was in graphics labs.  HP workstations with 8-bit frame
buffers were available for use by any graduate student at the UofU at
the time, with machines in the department's graphics lab all having
24-bit frame buffers by the time I arrived in 1988.  24-bit frame
buffers were common enough that even some of the common machines
shared by grad students in their offices were 24-bit.

Sun wasn't considered a serious contender in high-performance 3D
graphics at the time, so while there were a few Sun machines around
with 24-bit frame buffers, they were generally too slow so there
weren't very many of them purchased for that purpose.  The Sun
machines were most often used as file servers and they had 1-bit dumb
frame buffers on them.

So yes, this might have been very rare for a Sun, but it wasn't
necessarily very rare in the facility.
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