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I used one in the mid eighties, the SERC scattered them around British unis. The vertical hard drive had a wierd sparky engine when it spun, and it used graphic
by ggm 2y ago
I used one in the mid eighties, the SERC scattered them around British unis. The vertical hard drive had a wierd sparky engine when it spun, and it used graphics ram to compile so it scribbled over the display compiling C.
I used it's animated icon tool "cedra" to make tintin's captain haddock blow smoke out his ears.
We had the icl jv one. A beauty in reddish brown and cream. Made outside edinburgh near dalkeith I believe
- b112 2y agoThe graphics ram use is a neat optimized use of ram.
- zdw 2y agoThere was a 3rd party software tool (the name of which I forget) that used the same graphics memory as scratch space trick when copying floppies on early 128k (and probably 512k) Macs. This reduced the number of swaps required to copy a 400k floppy.
- pm215 2y agoI think it's more "we only have a megabyte of RAM, in some cases we'll just have to use the part the framebuffer is in". The Scavenger (its equivalent of the fsck filesystem checker) did the same thing.
- nxobject 2y agoIIRC it was part of a VLSI CAD initiative, right? But I may be getting my history mixed up.
- ggm 2y agoYes, that's my memory. No vlsi at york at the time, we worked on JANET coloured book protocols (me) and the ada compiler (other, far smarter people) and UNIX 32V (a very smart person) there