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

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...