4 ms·

My PC from 1987 was competitive with any workstation of the time but a lot cheaper. A 386DX-25 with 16MB RAM, a TMS34010 GPU and ESDI disks.

• LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Arc... !
  • rjsw 4y ago
    Mine predated the TIGA standard, it is a NEC card. I ported GNU binutils to it then wrote some 34010 assembler functions for X11 to call to do basic 2D graphics operations.
• lproven 4y ago
  It really was not. You were kidding yourself then and you still are. The year after that I bought an Acorn Archimedes A310. 8MHz ARM2. It was 4x faster in raw single-threaded integer computation than the top-end 80386DX 25MHz with L1 cache that IBM sold, and that was a $10,000 PC. It was about 10x quicker than your 16MHz machine... and it cost £800.
  • rjsw 4y ago
    Which version of UNIX did your A310 run?
    • lproven 4y ago
      It didn't, and I don't see the relevance. The point was not the OS, it was the performance, wasn't it?
      • rjsw 4y ago
        The point was the OS, that is what let you run workstation software of the time. Being able to add a lot (for the time) of RAM was important too, your A310 doesn't seem to be able to have 16MB. EDIT: This is a thread about UNIX.
        • lproven 4y ago
          I see. I never considered that especially important then, and I don't now, but OK then. In that case, I submit the Acorn R140 workstation running RISC iX. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3639/Acorn-R140/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3639/Acorn-R140/ RISC iX is broadly BSD 4.3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX A contemporary news story: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/acorn_fleshes_out_its_unix_workstation_with_peripherals_four_port_expansion_card https://techmonitor.ai/technology/acorn_fleshes_out_its_unix... Here is what BYTE thought of the successor model, the R260: https://vintagecomputers.sdfeu.org/mags/byte/Acorn_R260_review.pdf https://vintagecomputers.sdfeu.org/mags/byte/Acorn_R260_revi...
          • rjsw 4y ago
            Not really workstation-class graphics.
            • lproven 4y ago
              They were. The close integration of a fast RISC chip and a framebuffer meant astonishingly good graphics performance for the late 1980s. Bear in mind, this was before VESA local bus existed, before NeXTstep, anything like that. With a 4 MIPS CPU in 1987, you didn't need a dedicated GPU for blazingly-fast graphics. This interactive graphics demo was supplied on a floppy with the machine. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg Realtime 3D shaded graphics in 256 colours, with no hardware assistance? I'd rate that as workstation class, certainly. This is 2 years before the first SPARCstation, which shipped with a monochrome framebuffer as I recall. The R140 had 1152x900 mono but could display 4096 colours at VGA resolution. http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochures/Acorn_APP216_AWorldOfStandardsAcornR140Jan89.pdf http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...