[SunRescue] Recommend starter Sun?

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

bobkeys at weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu writes:

>A good boatanchor ham radio buddy of mine cross town at UNC Chapel Hill
>(Nick England) was the fellow who built it (Trancept Systems, later
>bought out by Sun).  He gave me my first sun 3/160 about 5 years back,
>and I had heard he used to build high-end graphics systems for Suns,
>but I never made the connection to taac.  It seems to be a neat board,
>taking I/O from the color board into and out of the taac to the monitor.
>I probably won't use the board, but might toss it to him as a funzy
>thing.  If he does not want it, I will check and see if he has any
>remaining info on it in his archives.  But, he made the comment that
>it was slower than most modern pc graphics, and not really worth
>doing anything serious with. 

I want it because it's VLIW, and I want to play with that.  (I'm also
trying to get a Multiflow Trace machine, but the only one I've seen
become available got snatched up by someone else...)

The impression I get isn't that the TTAC is a graphics processor so
much as a general purpose processing engine with it's own output to
video (using a weird "blue screen"-like approach).

>If he does not want it, it is yours
>for whatever swapum/wampum bits that are appropriate for sunzyfun,
>and won't break the shipping piggy's beer-bellie budget.

Amesome.

>Do you have any idea what that funny 4/150 piggyback processor
>cpu board is?

No idea. If no one else knows, you should put a photo up.

-- david fischer -- dave at cca.org -- www.cca.org -- Cthulhu told me to. --