24 Jan
2021
24 Jan
'21
10:29 p.m.
On 1/24/21 12:45 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Larry McVoy writes:
That was my project before I left for Apple.
Two versions, QBus and VME.
Big mistake was trusting AMD's QPDM.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/aed/colorware_cards/
Do you still have any of the code for it?
I was doing some
consulting for AED at the
time; they were making X accelerator boards
that plugged into Suns. I convinced them that there wasn't going to be
much of a market. Instead, I noticed that many large companies were using
SunView applications (think FrameMaker et. al.) for serious work, and were
not just going to ditch it for X just so they could watch the maze program
(there were no real X applications at the time). AED funded me to do the
XTool (Safe X for Suns) project which made X run in a SunView window.
That allowed customers who depended on SunView to also watch maze
when they were bored. It had two modes; run an X server in a window,
or use the Sun UI and run each X application in its own SunView window.
Unfortunately, AED had a management change who forced us to ship before
we were ready which made it fail. Were I smarter I would have tried to
get Sun to buy it. I think that I have a box of XTool tee shirts around
if anybody wants one.