

Sun's Star7: Touchscreen Tablet of 1992 - ForHackernews
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/star7/

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stevewilhelm
Another interesting early tablet story: Go Corp.

[http://www.guidebookgallery.org/books/thepowerofpenpoint/cha...](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/books/thepowerofpenpoint/chapter1)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp).

[http://www.amazon.com/Startup-A-Silicon-Valley-
Adventure/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Startup-A-Silicon-Valley-
Adventure/dp/0140257314)

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ChuckMcM
And it would burn your hand if you held it too long :-). It really was pretty
amazing cramming what was essentially a SPARCStation II+ into something that
small. When the group showed the cable companies the environment they could
have it got good reviews but it ran on a SPARCStation 10. They said they
_might_ spend $150 on the settop box hardware that year. (think Z80s + CRTC
chip). Now, 22 years later, $150 actually gets you something with similar
capability to the SS10 which could no doubt run the demo app just fine.

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i_am_ralpht
I have to imagine that $150 blows the SS10 away massively (yesterday's Nexus
Player is $99 with Bay Trail silicon with a solid GPU...) -- the speed of
commoditization of hardware this cycle has been pretty amazing.

The SGI guys had a similar experience when Nintendo bulk produced the N64 and
sold it for $200. It was most of a $5000 workstation with better graphics
hardware!

~~~
bodyfour
> I have to imagine that $150 blows the SS10 away massively

No doubt. Remember that the base model of a SS10 had a 0.033 GHz CPU. A
raspberry pi would run circles around it.

That's not even counting a modern GPU. A SPARCstation would usually be
equipped with a dumb framebuffer like a CG3 card.

Computers these days are _FAST_

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ChuckMcM
Actually the Raspberry Pi does _not_ run circles around it because it has to
do so much of its work through the USB bus. The Pi makes a good case study for
system architecture in that regard. The trick is to compare channel bandwidth,
memory, I/O, and cache to see see how those parts interact.

~~~
bodyfour
Sure, let's compare. I don't have every number at hand, but:

I/O: * SS10 -- Fast SCSI: 80 Mbit/sec theoretical max * Rpi -- USB2 480
Mbit/sec. Now there are certainly complaints about poor USB performance, but
it's not so bad that the SS10 would beat it

Cache: * SS10 -- 32K in the base model (although later ones had more) * Rpi --
256K

RAM: * SS10 -- depends on configuration; most machines of the era tended to
have 32MB or so. I actually had an SS10 with an exotic 128MB, but half of the
ram was actually on an SBus card. * Rpi -- 256MB in the lowest configuration
you can buy. True, that is shared with the GPU whereas the SS10's CG3 card had
its own memory if I remember right.

You are correct that the Rpi is bus and I/O crippled compared to most modern
hardware. That's why I chose it as an example: even the cheapest hardware you
can buy today is so much faster than a SS10. It's really astounding to think
about.

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kabdib
Usable USB2 bandwidth is about 40 MBytes/sec (you can squeeze out more, but
you're talking custom devices and carefully crafted protocols).

80 MBit/sec SCSI is 8 bits wide, with pretty good utilization (depends on the
drive), so it's going to do pretty well in comparison. I don't know if
1992-era drives could do (say) 100 MBytes/sec, maybe on the outer rims?

~~~
bodyfour
> 80 MBit/sec SCSI is 8 bits wide

No, I converted both of the speeds to MBit to make them easier to compare. The
SCSI on a SS10 was 10MB/sec, so 80Mb/sec.

The bus utilization on SCSI was high, and the USB2 on a Rpi is slow but not
nearly enough to make up for a 6x gap in raw bus speed.

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i_am_ralpht
Funny how everyone was doing the General Magic-style UI (where you had to
navigate down the street to the post office to send email) back then.

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pmontra
That and the incredible role of sound in the UI, so annoying for today's
standards. It seems they were communicating to the users of consoles and
arcade machines.

Maybe both techniques were inevitable at that stage of the general public
training to technology. Both were abandoned a few years later when Windows 95
and then the web made the PC really mainstream. Their language was totally
different and we all got used to it quickly.

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jvandonsel
What struck me was the jarring use of both "Australian" and "Traditional"
scrolling styles on the same device. The selection widgets moved along with
your finger, but the room panning moved counter to your finger. That would
drive me batty.

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osxrand
I was thinking the same thing. I wonder if they had both scrolling methods on
the device for testing purposes.

The noise while drawing around the room (and outside) was horrid. Nails on
chalkboard type horrid. I'd have thought the visual movement was enough to
convey the idea that you were navigating. But testing again I guess.

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agumonkey
Didn't watch the whole video, but I think that's the same device Gosling
demoed 'gravity' pull on. The relationship between so-called progress and
memory loss (or the lack of knowledge in that case) tickles my mind everytime.

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dang
Appeared recently on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411846).
Since there wasn't much discussion, we won't call the current thread a
duplicate.

