|
the tiny gold leaf spring connectors SGI used to use for their late internal interconnects the Symbolics console's 12-pin HIROSE connectors just kidding, both of those are loving awful the SGI gold leaf springs were prone to disappearing because they were so tiny and fragile, rendering exceptionally expensive hardware useless the Symbolics console cables were notoriously easy to mis-seat despite theoretically both keyed and locking, resulting in shorts that could damage both the console (as expensive as a PC) and the Lisp Machine (as expensive as a sports car, or possibly a house) bonus: the Symbolics console uses ECL voltage levels despite most of the hardware in both the console and the workstation being TTL, making it doubly difficult to deal with and repair. it does so because the workstation sends the pixels as a phase-encoded 160 MHz digital signal, using discreet ECL to do the encoding and decoding. in 1983. about the only good things about the Symbolics console design were that it used differential ECL signaling to provide a bidirectional serial channel (multiplexed for control, keyboard, mouse, and the RS-232 port on back) plus the phase-encoded video and 44.1 kHz digital audio in a way that could be routed for dozens of meters, so you could literally have all the loud and hot Lisp Machines in a machine room in the basement and the consoles on desks many floors away
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2017 03:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Jun 1, 2024 19:56 |
|
|
atomicthumbs posted:a single-wire video signal of a high enough clock speed that only ECL chips will do the job. jesus christ. in 1983 the dot clock was so high because it was 1150×900 the original console used a 68000 as a controller, too, don't know how much RAM it had but it was probably like 64KB imagine how much that cost—probably around the same as a Sun-2 with its ECL 19in monitor, except the Symbolics console was useless on its own (there was no local framebuffer, though the 68000 could control the brightness and invert the screen)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2017 20:47
|
|