[rescue] FS/FTGH: Sun kit

[Patrick Giagnocavo 717-201-3366]

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 01:24, Richard wrote:
> In article <43CC8062.907 at widomaker.com>,
>     Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  writes:
> 
> > For example, one Nubus card had four GPUs on it, and at the time was one 
> > of the fastest graphics cards you could get.  I can't remember the 
> > manufacturer.
> 
> Number Nine, perhaps?  I think they made a NuBus graphics adapter as
> well as a PC adapter.

Pretty sure this was the Radius or SuperMac card that had 4 DSPs on it.  It could accelerate PhotoShop operations as well.  Since Apple had an API called Color Quickdraw, they basically wrote a driver that executed the CQD commands on the graphics card hardware rather than on the host CPU - especially nice because at the time (System 7-ish), Apple's OS was not capable of preemptive multitasking .

> > I remember the first time I saw a "nice" Apple setup.  There was a IIci 
> > and a IIfx together, both with quad GPU graphics cards.  Everything was 
> > fast and smooth even at high resolutions.  Both of them cost more than a 
> > decent car.

Of course, either of those systems could replace a $40K typesetter and did not require you to learn arcane typesetting commands and a special, weird keyboard...

--Patrick