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Ah, ReGIS graphics. Sometimes the past comes and taps you on the shoulder. You mentioned the VK100 as the original ReGIS graphics terminal which I'm fairly su

Ah, ReGIS graphics. Sometimes the past comes and taps you on the shoulder. You mentioned the VK100 as the original ReGIS graphics terminal which I'm fairly sure is correct. It might be worth mentioning that terminal's more familiar name, the "GIGI". It actually came out a fair bit sooner, certainly earlier than '85. I'm pretty sure I was working in a lab stuffed full of them in '82, '83 at the latest. They were a pretty fun terminal to work with. Among other things, they supported the ability to upload bitmap fonts. A friend of mine put together a "Rogue Font" which put those terminals in demand in our lab for playing "rogue". I did a multi-terminal chess board system for them. ReGIS was supported in later DEC terminals, the VT-240, VT-300 etc. By that time I was working in the TBU's (Terminal Business Unit) QA group which was '85 and on. That was the same era that DEC released their first PostScript based printer (the LPS-40) not too long after the Apple LaserWriter came out. It was a fun time for early computer graphics.

new299 14y ago
I've updated the site, thanks for the comments. That lab sounds awesome, I would have loved to have played with those terminals. It's unfortunate that we lost ReGIS support in modern terminals. The ReGIS support I currently have is pretty basic, mostly just designed to support gnuplot line graphs. If you have any old code that generates ReGIS graphics I'd LOVE to see it.
- jrabone 14y ago
  I probably do, but it would be on DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies; gave up trying to find PC software and drive that could read them long ago (they're pretty non-standard) and the real hardware has been skipped. Some DEC archive somewhere probably has the equivalent. Perhaps ftp://www.decus.org/pub/lib/v00365/vaxregis.zip ?
  - new299 14y ago
    Have you thought about contacting the Archive team? They might be able to help you out. I'd hate to see that stuff get lost. Could access that path, but found: /anon/public/decus/vms/library/v00365 Looks great! All fortran 77 code by the looks of it, will certainly be something fun to play with, thanks!

new299 14y ago

I've updated the site, thanks for the comments. That lab sounds awesome, I would have loved to have played with those terminals. It's unfortunate that we lost ReGIS support in modern terminals. The ReGIS support I currently have is pretty basic, mostly just designed to support gnuplot line graphs. If you have any old code that generates ReGIS graphics I'd LOVE to see it.

jrabone 14y ago
I probably do, but it would be on DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies; gave up trying to find PC software and drive that could read them long ago (they're pretty non-standard) and the real hardware has been skipped. Some DEC archive somewhere probably has the equivalent. Perhaps ftp://www.decus.org/pub/lib/v00365/vaxregis.zip ?
- new299 14y ago
  Have you thought about contacting the Archive team? They might be able to help you out. I'd hate to see that stuff get lost. Could access that path, but found: /anon/public/decus/vms/library/v00365 Looks great! All fortran 77 code by the looks of it, will certainly be something fun to play with, thanks!