In that era, rendering of the frame buffer was often performed by writing to a film slide recorder.
That is, it streamed a bitmap to a printer that wrote to optical film stock.
We had a slide recorder at one of my early IT jobs. IIRC, it was at output device for a Macintosh computer, which meant that it was technically my responsibility to keep running, but it was a special beast so I would basically check to see if it was plugged in correctly and not on fire; for anything else, I would call the vendor that leased it to us.
I'm pretty sure that the film stock, once written, needed to be developed like any other photo film, but that was 30 years ago and I just can't recall.
But sure, kid: write a demoscene for it. 0.0005 frames per second...
I'm not sure that qualifies as halfway (or even remotely) plausible, but with sufficient pipelining (tens of thousands of optical printers with parallel IO hardware and an equal number of people developing slides and loading them up), miracles may be possible. Given resources on the scale of the Apollo program, you could make some super sick demos. Way cooler than collecting moon rocks.
Joking aside, this essentially hardcopy-to-film is a thing that I never considered existing, yet sounds completely plausible. Even so, a color framebuffer with a CRT attached was certainly not unobtainium by the early to mid 80s.
Absolutely, yes color frame buffers and CRT display was widely available. The Cromemco S-100 bus computers were used for television news weather visualization and for engineering applications.
Hmm. I think perhaps the limit was on resolution and color depth. The movie "TRON" was done with slide recorders, and now I have another rabbit hole to dig out of!
(The BYTE Magazine article that had me thinking of high end graphics at the time, and the use of film as output, is from November 1982. I was in 8th grade and read every page of these monstrous, 400-page times. Like the Sears Christmas catalog, every month.)
> I could just go ask the old Cray-1 that's a block up the street from here, but he is now a museum display and doesn't talk much.
Show off ;-)
The first SGI IRIS shipped in 1983. You could probably stream a 320x200 8-bit bitmap to it via ethernet, but that'd probably be considered cheating because another computer holds the display. The grand dad of the X-MP, the CDC-6x00 had a couple peripheral processors that could push memory out (used in those awesome dual-round-screen terminals), and I remember seeing a terminal like those (with a single screen) running off a Cray-1 somewhere, so it could be possible with hardware actually used at the time.
Absolutely possible to get a display. I remember the single color Textronix display we had in the lab in college. The computer club managed to get a Mandelbrot Set renderer distributed across the Sun 3 computers in our lab, plus another dozen or so at a lab at MIT, so we got display -- in color! -- in a matter of seconds. It was amazing.
A friend of mine here was one of the first CDC-6600 system operators and programmers at University of Texas at Austin. A few months before I was born. He learned to really get a feel for the program flowing through the machine, hours of starting into those two huge round CRTs.
The original Textronix 4014 was a single-display version of that, and there was another standardized display like that for air traffic control. Monochrome.
The Tektronix had a "storage tube" where you could trace an image and it'd be "self-refreshed". Other vector displays, such as the IBM 2250 and the CDC had to rely on long persistence phosphors and needed to refresh the image quickly or it'd flicker. The CDC had to move the beam so fast the characters are deformed by the analog responses to x-y positioning. If you look closely at the screen, it has a Comic Sans vibe to it.
> and there was another standardized display like that for air traffic control. Monochrome.
I'd LOVE to see one in person. And to get one to play with.
To be fair, I'd be pretty happy with a decommissioned 28" 2048x2048 air traffic LCD display.
That is, it streamed a bitmap to a printer that wrote to optical film stock.
We had a slide recorder at one of my early IT jobs. IIRC, it was at output device for a Macintosh computer, which meant that it was technically my responsibility to keep running, but it was a special beast so I would basically check to see if it was plugged in correctly and not on fire; for anything else, I would call the vendor that leased it to us.
I'm pretty sure that the film stock, once written, needed to be developed like any other photo film, but that was 30 years ago and I just can't recall.
But sure, kid: write a demoscene for it. 0.0005 frames per second...