9 Apr
2022
9 Apr
'22
8:03 a.m.
Feels like a good fit. If they'd got into the right hands in a uni they'd
have been doing the same thing, but my personal sense was they mostly got
to CS departments, small volumes went to people with real world 2D and 3D
design drive, and when commodity high res scan displays went mass market
then CAD bust out and rotring pen shares went south.
There was this weird dichotomy that architecture schools would have
analogue computers because air conditioning engineers used them, but they
had to walk to the computer centre to do programming (this was my
experience at Leeds uni basically)
Vector graphics were sweet-as. People liked pixels better.
More people would have experienced vector scan as asteroids or the tank
game that made it into video game parlours but by then 75% plus of the
cabinets were raster displays.
The Tektronix 4010 at York was almost always free, people went to the apl
decwriter before they'd use it. I really loved it!
On Sat, 9 Apr 2022, 10:54 am Phil Budne, <phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote:
George Michaelson wrote:
I've never met anyone who did more than
play on a gt40, myself
included. I
suspect it was something DEC sales loved, but
maybe it made a lot less
profit than vt52s, decwriters and other io devices attached to your
normal
11 chassis.
Perhaps some architects made good use of it?
Inside DEC they were used (with DEC-20s) to run the Stanford SUDS CAD
software.
p