Talk:Line Drawing System-1

Important device

This was a significant machine - the first display device with geometry pipelines, or at least one pipeline, with the 16 multipliers of a graphics processor. (That hardware took a mainframe-sized cabinet.) It didn't have "fill"; that came in with the Evans and Sutherland Picture System. --John Nagle (talk) 05:24, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Brochure

The photo in the brochure shows 3 full height 19" racks. The block diagram shows a Character Generator, Matrix Multiplier, Clipping Divider and Line Generator - all connected to a mainframe computer by a Channel Controller. A typical mainframe of the era would have been a SDS Sigma series Sigma 7 (which is what was used with the LDS-1 at NASA Ames).

The designation "LDS" was a pun on the predominant religion in Utah - most of the employees were members of the LDS Church. Mccainre (talk) 19:06, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Repaired article

Added a block diagram of the system, redrawn from the original. Found original DARPA progress report on the project and linked it. Pointed out that this was the first machine with a graphics processing unit, so it's notable. (It took several racks of hardware back then.) John Nagle (talk) 20:16, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Esports

A case can be made the MIT LDS-1 was involved in early Esports. A program would display an ongoing MAZE game. Dave Lebling wrote on GitHub, "in one room was the E&S LDS-1: the Evans and Sutherland graphics computer that was wired into the 10 as well. Tak To wrote a "Maze Watcher" that ran on the E&S and let you snoop on ongoing Maze matches: an early anticipation of eSports..." https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1420#issuecomment-479060676 Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 10:34, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

"First"?

The Vector General machines shipped around the same time as the LDS, and definitely had a GPU. I am not sure of this claim, it needs further backing. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:42, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

There were also several earlier advanced graphics terminals with a "GPU", like the 1967 IDI Input-Output Machine (IDI IDIIOM), the 1968 Adage AGT/xx series of terminals, etc. Vintageperson (talk) 00:17, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I believe the claim in the article refers to the LDS-1 having hardware for the traditional 3D graphics pipeline with 4x4 matrix multiplication for geometry transformation, line clipping, etc. I can't see whether IDIIOM had this kind of hardware, but Vector General (in 1972) and AGT (1968) did have at least part of the pipeline. Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 07:21, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

The Adage AGT definitely had a hardware 4x4 matrix multiplier (see here, pages 42-43), and it did perform 2D and 3D "windowing" (showing portions of a full image and cropping what's not visible). However, it seemed to use cut-off blanking (see here, page 763 in the PDF) instead of clipping like the LDS-1. The difference between these two is explained in A clipping divider (1968).

Edit: The AGT/10, /30 and /50 were announced by August 1967 (page 19), with first deliveries of the /10 estimated by January 1968, over a year and a half before the LDS-1's first shipment to BBN. The 3D capabilities of the higher-end AGT models were demonstrated and advertised by December 1967 (page 8), two years before the LDS-1 was advertised in December 1969 (page 25).

The LDS-1 was compared to the AGT in the September 13, 1971 issue of Electronics (page 78): "The AGT uses hybrid analog-digital circuits, whereas the LDS-1 is all digital." Vintageperson (talk) 02:49, 4 December 2024 (UTC)