3 ms·

So what exactly is a vectrex computer? My real question is what’s the limits of a vector display and why didn’t it take off?

• banana_dick_7 2y ago
  [dead]
• kragen 2y ago
  Vectrex was a home video game console with a vector display. Vector ("calligraphic") displays were a common alternative for high-resolution graphics from the 01950s until about 01990. Evans & Sutherland were among the last vendors standing. I don't think it's accurate to say it didn't take off; it just landed afterwards, like cassette tapes or slide rules. Advantages of a vector display: you can display a 1024x1024 3-D image on a machine with 16KiB of RAM and less than a MIPS. You get a lot of dynamic range, so you can make some points on the screen extremely bright. Disadvantages: you can only draw bright lines on a black background; you can't fill areas, though you can come close if you draw a lot of lines. So all your 3-D is sort of wireframey, though you can of course do hidden line removal. Most vector displays got extremely flickery when displaying more than a few thousand lines; the alternative was the Tektronix 4014 bistable storage tube, which didn't flicker at all because it had analog memory for the vector image (and could therefore do CAD over a 2400 baud serial line) but could only be erased by flashing the whole screen green. So you couldn't do animation. Basically, once digital memory got cheap enough to back your megapixel screen with a megabit framebuffer, and CPUs got fast enough to draw and erase diagonal lines through it in real time, raster displays could be better in every way than vector displays, so vector displays made them obsolete.
  • kragen 2y ago
    This should read, "so raster displays made them [vector displays] obsolete." Those responsible for the error have been sacked.