The Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) was a spinoff from the Research Engineering Laboratory of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and was founded in May 1974 by Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadley, J. Stanley Kriz, D. Raj Reddy and Paul G. Newbury in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States to manufacture advanced technology computer displays, peripherals, and systems.
Early products included: the GDP/2A Graphics Display processor with high speed vector generator capable of drawing in excess of 50,000 vectors at 60Hz refresh rates; a CVD/2 Color Video Display System that displayed a full color raster scanned image with a unique data compression algorithm capable of full frame animation display; ADA-16 Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog converters for high fidelity music and speech research, and a UMB-11 Unibus Monitor that was a low-cost test instrument for PDP-11 series minicomputers. In 1979, the company launched its principal products, a line of workstationcomputers called PERQ, which were single-user high performance workstations with the power of a medium-scale mainframe computer from that era coupled with a versatile graphics display. In the summer of 1980, the company divested itself of all activities other than those related to PERQ.
From 1981 onwards, 3RCC developed and produced the PERQ jointly with ICL in the United Kingdom. 3RCC changed its name to PERQ Systems Corporation in 1984, but became insolvent in 1985.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by James Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.
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.
A framebuffer is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor.
Mentor Graphics Corporation was a US-based electronic design automation (EDA) multinational corporation for electrical engineering and electronics, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon. Founded in 1981, the company distributed products that assist in electronic design automation, simulation tools for analog mixed-signal design, VPN solutions, and fluid dynamics and heat transfer tools. The company leveraged Apollo Computer workstations to differentiate itself within the computer-aided engineering (CAE) market with its software and hardware.
A music workstation is an electronic musical instrument providing the facilities of:
The DECstation was a brand of computers used by DEC, and refers to three distinct lines of computer systems—the first released in 1978 as a word processing system, and the latter two both released in 1989. These comprised a range of computer workstations based on the MIPS architecture and a range of PC compatibles. The MIPS-based workstations ran ULTRIX, a DEC-proprietary version of UNIX, and early releases of OSF/1.
Tektronix, historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent company, it is now a subsidiary of Fortive, a spinoff from Danaher Corporation.
Evans & Sutherland is an American computer graphics firm founded in 1968 by David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins, sold products that were used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation.
Computervision, Inc. (CV) was an early pioneer in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM). Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. Its early products were built on a Data General Nova platform. Starting around 1975, Computervision built its own "CGP" Nova-compatible 16-bit computers with added instructions optimized for graphics applications and using its own operating system known as Computervision Graphic Operating System (CGOS). In the 1980s, Computervision rewrote their code to operate on Unix-based platforms.
The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, is a pioneering workstation computer produced in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. It is the first commercially-produced personal workstation with a graphical user interface (GUI). The design of the PERQ was heavily influenced by the original workstation computer, the Xerox Alto, which was never commercially produced. The workstation was conceived by six former Carnegie Mellon University alumni and employees: Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadley, J. Stanley Kriz, Raj Reddy and Paul G. Newbury, who formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) in 1974.
The Terak 8510/a was a graphical desktop workstation developed by the Terak Corporation in 1977. It was among the first desktop personal computers with a bitmap graphics display. It was a desktop workstation with an LSI-11 compatible processor, a graphical framebuffer, and a text mode with downloadable fonts. The combined weight of processor, display, and keyboard was approximately 50lb. Despite the lack of an MMU, it was capable of running a stripped version of UNIX version 6. It was the first personal machine on which the UCSD p-System was widely used. Various universities in the USA used it in the late 1970s through mid-1980s to teach Pascal programming. It provided immediate graphic feedback from simple programs encouraging students to learn.
Elan Graphics is a computer graphics architecture for Silicon Graphics computer workstations. Elan Graphics was developed in 1991 and was available as a high-end graphics option on workstations released during the mid-1990s as part of the Express Graphics architectures family. Elan Graphics gives the workstation real-time 2D and 3D graphics rendering capability similar to that of even high-end PCs made over ten years after Elan's introduction, with the exception of texture mapping, which had to be performed in software.
IMLAC Corporation was an American electronics company in Needham, Massachusetts, that manufactured graphical display systems, mainly the PDS-1 and PDS-4, in the 1970s.
The 3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technical workstations. It requires at least one megabyte of memory, a one megapixel display with 1024×1024 1-bit pixels, and one million instructions per second (MIPS) of processing power. It was also often said that it should cost no more than one "megapenny" or $10,000.
Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1980s. The company was formed in 1989 when Ardent Computer Corporation and Stellar Computer Inc. merged.
DEC GT40 is a VT11 vector graphic terminal and general-purpose computer produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation, first introduced in October, 1972.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Chromatics Inc. was a color graphics display manufacturer based in Tucker, Georgia. Their systems predated the personal computer era of inexpensive graphics displays, and were typically used as peripheral devices, connected to a mainframe or minicomputer. In some configurations, a Chromatics graphics terminal could be used as a stand-alone workstation, with disk drives and an operating system.
Adage, Inc., was a Boston-based electronics and computer manufacturer founded in 1957, first specializing in analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, and later in computer graphics systems.
Parallax Graphics, Inc., was an American developer and manufacturer of high-specification computer graphics cards for various platforms, and of supporting software. The company was founded in 1982 as Parallax Systems by two Cornell University graduates.
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