Imlac PDS-1 - Imlac Product Evolution

Imlac Product Evolution

  • 1968: Imlac founded. Their business plan was interactive graphics terminals for stock exchange traders, which did not happen.
  • 1970: PDS-1 introduced for general graphics market.
  • 1972: PDS-1D introduced. It was similar to the PDS-1 with improved circuits and backplane.
  • 1973: PDS-1G introduced.
  • 1974: PDS-4 introduced. It ran twice as fast and displayed twice as much lines or text without flicker. Its display processor supported instantaneous interactive magnification with clipping. It had an optional floating point add-on.
  • 1977: A total of about 700 PDS-4 systems had been sold in the USA. They were built upon order rather than being mass produced.
  • 1978: Dynagraphic 3250 introduced. It was designed to be used mainly by a proprietary Fortran-coded graphics library running on larger computers, without customer programming inside the terminal.
  • ????: Dynagraphic 6220 introduced.
  • 1979: Imlac Corporation acquired by Hazeltine Corporation, a maker of text-only terminals.
  • 1981: Hazeltine's Imlac Dynagraphic Series II introduced. It was designed to be compatible with SIGGRAPH's CORE 1979 3D graphics library standard. Its cost was $9000 in OEM quantities. It had 2Kx2K resolution, 192 kilobytes of ram, and an 8086 microprocessor, all inside the monitor unit.

The DEC GT40 had a similar design and price point to the PDS-1D. Its desktop electronics were more compact and used a mass-produced PDP 11/05 board set as its local minicomputer. This automatically gave it a much bigger set of programming tools. But it too was usually driven by applications running on larger PDP systems.

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