RWG’s mission was to sell parallel-processor RISC based graphics systems that could rival the dedicated rendering hardware put out by the likes of Silicon Graphics or Evans and Sutherland. The big new product of 1990, which I got to re-write and then write new manuals for, was the Reality board; the aforementioned ISA-bus card. By 1990 standards it was a monster, with 4Mb of VRAM, 16Mb of DRAM (the RAM chips packed so densely they were stacked on edge), four beer-mat sized Intel i860 RISC processors, and a Ti 34020 just to do the 2-D head-up overlays. The ten-layer PCBs were so balky that each one had to be hand-finished, and the RISC CPUs selected carefully to fit together in their carriers; it didn’t quite glow red hot, but having a well-ventilated case and a powerful fan was recommended. These things sold for £16,000 a pop; I didn’t see their like again until 1998, in the shape of a Matrox G400 costing £250 or so and targeted at high-end gamers. Graham was, quite literally, right on the bleeding edge of graphics technology. At one point he bolted together a VME-based massively parallel system for a demo of his new “Super Reality” architecture. I suspect it may have been the most powerful supercomputer in England at the time — sitting on the desk next to me, with 96 RISC processors churning away to display a large 3D model in real time on seven monitors. (XGA spec, 24 bit colour, mist and fog and multiple light sources — in 1990!)
If that doesn’t get you going, don’t bother clicking through to read the whole thing.
Matrox used to make some neat stuff, too. I had a Matrox 286-based system that had a Matrox-rebranded Yamaha laserdisc player bolted to the top, all in the same shade of beige under a huge metal cover. The 286 machine had some pretty wild (for the time) graphics hardware – video overlay with titling, etc. The computer would control the laser disc player through a serial interface and display graphics or text that went with the video or still images that the ldp was playing.
All the video hardware was implemented in ugly glue logic, discreet components, low density dram, etc. I wish I still had some of that stuff – but then again it’s nice to have a relatively clean house.
Wow. That story reminds me of the job I had at a small startup making graphics acceleration hardware for American flight simulators. No, it was a different company, Io Inc, in Tucson. We did 2D displays in the mid-1980s using AMD 2900 bit slices.
But we had a somewhat happier ending – we got bought out by a slightly larger California VMEbus computer maker and survived.
I still see our products show up on ebay now and then, even the early flight simulator graphics system!