Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!amelia!prandtl.nas.nasa.gov!msf
From: msf@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Blitters and design philosophy
Message-ID: <816@amelia.nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 8 Aug 88 12:56:25 GMT
References: <62659@<1988Aug1> <46500023@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@amelia.nas.nasa.gov
Reply-To: msf@prandtl (Michael S. Fischbein)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Lines: 25

In article <46500023@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>I have always doubted the value of special purpose hardware, though 
>I have been responsible for some real doozies myself. In the vast 
>majority of cases, general is better. A recent example from my own
>experience: a frient wanted to port a TeX screen previewer I had 
>written for the  (very general-purpose) IBM-PC to his whizz-bang
>super-dooper graphics Iris 4.

Of course, a better way to do this would be to translate the required TeX
fonts to the Iris format and simply print them on the screen, using the
Iris special purpose hardware instead of fighting it.  Of course, this would
require rewriting the TeX screen previewer from your (small-memory addressing,
small file space capability, severely limited processing power, no hardware
display scaling or clipping, etc) IBM-PC for the whizz-bang super-dooper
(optimized for real time animation) Iris.


		mike


Michael Fischbein                 msf@ames-nas.nas.nasa.gov
                                  ...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf
These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any
organization.