8 Mar
2023
8 Mar
'23
9:06 p.m.
On 8 Mar 2023, at 15:23, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 7:53 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
Yes, I got a bit carried away there. The point I was trying to make was in context of the
wheel of reincarnation, though: if the system is a Vax and a Blit, we could conceptually
think of the Blit as an accelerated graphics card for the Vax, having made one full
revolution. If this is nonsense, why is the Magnolia different?
This also has a relation to the point about what
constitutes a "workstation" and one of the comments was that it needs to have
"integrated graphics". What is integrated in this historical context -- is it a
shared memory frame buffer, is it a shared CPU, is it physically in the same box or just
an integrated user experience? It seems to me that it is not easy to delineate. Consider a
Vax connected to a Tek raster scan display, a Vax connected to a Blit, Clem’s Magnolia and
a networked Sun-1. Which ones are workstations? If shared memory is the key only Clem’s
Magnolia and the Sun-1 qualify. If it is a shared CPU only a standalone Sun-1 qualifies,
but its CPU would be heavily taxed when doing graphics, so standalone graphics was maybe
not a normal use case. For now my rule of thumb is that it means (in a 1980’s-1990’s
context) a high-bandwidth path between the compute side and display side, with enough
total combined power to drive both the workload and the display.
I wouldn't try to be too rigid in your terms here. The term
"workstation" was probably never well-defined; it had more of an
intuitive connotation of a machine that was more powerful than
something you could get on the consumer market (like a PC or 8-bit
microcomputer), but wasn't a minicomputer or mainframe/supercomputer.