Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's 8-bit home computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available in July. It was the first personal computer with a bitmapped color graphical user interface, using a version of Digital Research's GEM interface / operating system from February 1985.
The Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems in this family use Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and initially ran the Arthur operating system, with later models introducing RISC OS and, in a separate workstation range, RISC iX. The first Archimedes models were introduced in 1987, and systems in the Archimedes family were sold until the mid-1990s alongside Acorn's newer Risc PC and A7000 models.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. They were designed and produced by Inmos, a semiconductor company based in Bristol, United Kingdom.
Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor.
The Intel i860 is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of the 1980s. It was the world's first million-transistor chip. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and icons in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned, handling transparent pixels, and various ways of combining the source and destination data.
Apollo/Domain is a series of workstations that were developed and produced by Apollo Computer from c. 1980 to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k series of processors, except for the DN10000, which has from one to four of Apollo's RISC processors, named PRISM.
The Apple IIGS is a 16-bit personal computer produced by Apple Computer. It is the fifth and most powerful of the Apple II family. It is compatible with earlier Apple II models, but has a Macintosh look and feel, and resolution and color similar to the Amiga and Atari ST. The "GS" in the name stands for "Graphics and Sound", referring to its enhanced multimedia hardware, especially its state-of-the-art audio.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
RISC iX is a discontinued Unix operating system designed to run on a series of workstations based on the Acorn Archimedes microcomputer. Heavily based on 4.3BSD, it was initially completed in 1988, a year after Arthur but before RISC OS. It was introduced in the ARM2-based R140 workstation in 1989, followed up by the ARM3-based R200-series workstations in 1990.
Inmos International plc and two operating subsidiaries, Inmos Limited (UK) and Inmos Corporation (US), was a British semiconductor company founded by Iann Barron, Richard Petritz, and Paul Schroeder in July 1978. Inmos Limited’s head office and design office were at Aztec West business park in Bristol, England.
Perihelion Software Limited was a United Kingdom company founded in 1986 by Dr. Tim King along with a number of colleagues who had all worked together at MetaComCo on AmigaOS and written compilers for both the Amiga and the Atari ST.
Helios is a discontinued Unix-like operating system for parallel computers. It was developed and published by Perihelion Software. Its primary architecture is the Inmos Transputer. Helios' microkernel implements a distributed namespace and messaging protocol, through which services are accessed. A POSIX compatibility library enables the use of Unix application software, and the system provides most of the usual Unix utilities.
The Atari TT030 is a member of the Atari ST family, released in 1990. It was originally intended to be a high-end Unix workstation, but Atari took two years to release a port of Unix SVR4 for the TT, which prevented the TT from ever being seriously considered in its intended market.
The Professional 325 (PRO-325), Professional 350 (PRO-350), and Professional 380 (PRO-380) are PDP-11 compatible microcomputers. The Pro-325/350 were introduced in 1982 and the Pro-380 in 1985 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as high-end competitors to the IBM PC.
The G364 framebuffer was a line of graphics adapters using the SGS Thomson INMOS G364 colour video controller, produced by INMOS in the early 1990s. The G364 included a RAMDAC and a 64-bit interface to VRAM graphical memory to implement a framebuffer, but did not include any hardware-based graphical acceleration other than a hardware cursor function.
The TMS34010, developed by Texas Instruments and released in 1986, was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. While specialized graphics hardware existed earlier, such as blitters, the TMS34010 chip is a microprocessor which includes graphics-oriented instructions, making it a combination of a CPU and what would later be called a GPU. It found use in arcade video games from the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, including Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, and computer workstation video accelerator boards. TI later released the TMS34020 with an emphasis on 3D rendering.
Hombre is a RISC chipset for the Amiga, designed by Commodore, which was intended as the basis of a range of Amiga personal computers and multimedia products, including a successor to the Amiga 1200, a next generation game machine called CD64 and a 3D accelerator PCI card. Hombre was canceled along with the bankruptcy of Commodore International.
Isra Vision Parsytec AG is a company of Isra Vision, founded in 1985 as Parsytec in Aachen, Germany.
