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SGI, Sun, HP, even NeXT supported multiple displays, frame buffers, and GPUs. You could put 2 or 3 NeXTdimension cards in a NeXT Turbo Cube, for example - each

SGI, Sun, HP, even NeXT supported multiple displays, frame buffers, and GPUs. You could put 2 or 3 NeXTdimension cards in a NeXT Turbo Cube, for example - each with its own i860 running Display PostScript and something like 32MB of RAM - and use a display attached to each. And the other workstation vendors had even fancier graphics subsystems and options. You could get real time stereo (LCD shutter) 3D with full Z-buffer and overlay planes for UI use (requiring a few dozen MB of VRAM) for the cost of a sports car. And with some systems use several at once. Find some old copies of UNIX World or Personal Workstation or BYTE from the era...

blinkingled 13y ago
May be GPUs are a bad example - for USB, FireWire and most of the other driver code and supporting infrastructure that constitutes the Linux kernel, the point (that its design is mostly uninfluenced by older UNIX) still stands. Besides the old UNIX vendors did not seem to have contributed much in terms of Linux GPU stack, maybe because that's not where the money was/is. SGI contributions for e.g. are in the area of FS and scalability predominantly. (I am aware that some places use Linux workstations for Graphics - but Nvidia essentially ships there own Xorg replacement stack along with highly kludgy properietary driver - nothing remotely related to great design there.) Filesystems, TCP/IP stack, Multi core scalability etc are the areas that most benefited from old UNIX design. (Questionable in case of TCP/IP - Alan Cox rewrote it and I am not sure if he was influenced by any older UNIX implementation or not.)