Talk:Evans & Sutherland ES-1

Information

I found this article from The New York Times while looking for information about E&S graphics hardware. It mentions the introduction date, who fabricated the custom CMOS chips and the first customers (there were four). Perhaps this should be included in the article? (I don't feel like making edits at the moment). Rilak (talk) 05:19, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Alternate version of events

I was working as a Field Engineer for Evans & Sutherland's Interactive Division in Northern California and visited the Computer Division several times during the product development. Lecerque's vision was for a "moderately parallel" supercomputer that would fill a hole between massively parallel systems and traditional systems.

Software was designed using multiple Sun Workstations as simulated nodes of the VLSI chip. The VLSI chips were built at the HP foundry and were some of the largest ever built (up to that time). When the actual VLSI chips were installed and run at full clock speed some locations on the die developed hot spots which caused intermittent computational failures. Since no one had ever built such a large high speed chip before this problem was not anticipated. (VLSI simulators are NOW designed to detect potential hot spots and suggest design alternatives.) The E&S board overruled Dave Evans and voted to discontinue funding of the project after spending around 55 million to bring the design to this point. It would have cost about another 5 million to redesign the VLSI chip. The short term solution was to reduce the clock speed - a lot - which made the performance not very impressive.

My colleague Pat Goforth was present at the product launch and told me that several members of the press roundly criticized the product, saying things like "In the past E&S has always understated the potential of their products and their performance. Today you are trying to give us a smoke and mirrors version of a product that sort-of works - if it can even be fixed"

Incidentally, the E&S Computer Division was in Mountain View just down the street from Silicon Graphics (E&S's biggest competitor in the interactive workstation market).

The software engineers who worked on the Mach kernel went on to enrich the Silicon Valley computing community. At least one worked at Apple Computer where Mach formed the basis for multitasking in the MacOS. (Avie Tevanian? - needs research) Today we've seen thousands of laptops networked together using software that evolved from Mach.

I remember seeing pieces of the ES-1 prototypes at Halted (or Hal-Ted) (computer surplus) in Mountain View after the division closed. --Mccainre (talk) 21:30, 9 September 2012 (UTC)