So how many of you can claim to know all of this already? :)

[MrSingh]

http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/history.html

anyone got anything interesting to add?

 

[Gunhead]

Hey, a great linkage! I didn't, at least not all of it

Reminds me of a philosophy lecture where someone asked "Peirce who?"

 

[Gunhead]

BTW, does E&S manufacture their own graphics hardware? If not, what are they using? Not just CPUs (judging from the 230/460/920 Mpixel/s figures on their page)?

 

[MrFloopy]

Yes they do develop their own hardware, and have done so for as long as I can remember.

Mainly used in flight sims now, they were the mainstay of graphics subsystems for sun workstations in opposition to sgi in late 80's early 90's.

 

[PSarge]

BTW, does E&S manufacture their own graphics hardware? If not, what are they using? Not just CPUs (judging from the 230/460/920 Mpixel/s figures on their page)?

They used to, but they stopped a couple of years ago. It was high end stuff only.

 

[Entropy]

Mainly used in flight sims now, they were the mainstay of graphics subsystems for sun workstations in opposition to sgi in late 80's early 90's.

Before that, their vector terminals were even more of a mainstay in higher-end graphics. Most of my colleagues felt that the early SGIs were totally unacceptable due to their aliased vectors. When SGI added hardware line anti-aliasing, they started making inroads. They still weren't as fast as the faster E&S, on the other hand they didn't have the horrible flickering of the E&S vector terminals (since these didn't start redrawing until all vectors had been drawn).

Before SGI, E&S still had some competition in the vector terminal game, but none that we ever cared much for, even though I started out on one such back in the monocrome vector age (Vector Graphics?).

The E&S terminals where a pain to program. The only one I ever heard who disagreed said "No they're quite simple actually - very similar to how you program analog computers".
Yeah. Thanks a lot.

Entropy

<Edit> PS: If there, against all odds, is someone on this list who have both programmed old E&S vector terminals and analog computers, I would appreciate if you could tell me if the guy actually had something or if he was only bullshitting me.

 

[Reznor007]

Namco used the E&S TR3 hardware in its System22 and Super System22 arcade boards. It ran games like Ridge Racer and Prop Cycle.

http://www.system16.com/namco/hrdw_system22.html

http://www.system16.com/namco/hrdw_supersystem22.html

 

[MrFloopy]

They used to, but they stopped a couple of years ago. It was high end stuff only

My bad, seems like only yesterday that harmony was released, which was their last hardware product.

 

[Bigus Dickus]

Visteon donated a CAD workstation to my colligiate design group a couple of years ago... it had an E&S Lightning 1200 graphics card.

Plenty of CAD oriented hardware acceleration options, but it wasn't the fastest card on the block. Limited to 1280 x 1024 resolution too.

 

[megadrive0088]

E&S had some highend PC cards several years ago. Freedom series.
Also, a chipset used in many of their products, the RealImage chipsets. I think Freedom used RealImage, not sure though.. RealImage from what I understand, was a mid range E&S chipset. I'm not that familar with E&S line of cards/chipsets/image generators, but Harmony was their highest end system AFAIK--equivalent to SGI Infinite Reality.

I've heard of E&S TR3 hardware, used by Namco in System 22, but know next to nothing about it.. TR3 has to be pretty old and lowend, and there's nothing on it at www.ES.com - and almost nothing on the web.

Overall, E&S and Lockheed had the best graphics outside of SGI.. perhaps better than SGI in some areas. E&S is basicly the undisputed leader in civilian and military fight simulation. Lockheed was competition though, and SGI is there also, but E&S dominates that field.

Any more info and comments on E&S and Lockheed, their 3D graphics hardware for simulators, workstations, arcade, etc would be most welcome.

 

[darkblu]

apropos, weren't Real3D (the guys who designed intel's on-board cores) a Lockheed offspring?