NeXTdimension
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NeXTdimension (ND) was an accelerated 32 bit color board manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 that gave the NeXTcube color capabilities with PostScript. The NuBus card was a full size card for the NeXTcube, filling one of four slots, another one being filled with the main board itself. The NeXTdimension featured s-video input and output, RGB output, an Intel i860 64 bit RISC processor at 33MHz for Postscript acceleration, 8-32MB RAM main memory and 4MB VRAM for a resolution of 1120*832 at 24 bit color plus 8 bit alpha channel. An onboard C-Cube CL550 chip for MJPEG video compression was announced, but never shipped. A handful of engineering prototypes for the MJPEG daughterboard exist, but none actually function.
A stripped down Mach kernel was used as the operating system for the card. Due to the supporting processor 32 bit color Display PostScript on the NeXTdimension was faster than 2 bit grayscale Display PostScript on the NeXTcube. Since the main board always included the grayscale video logic, adding a NeXTdimension allowed the simultaneous use of two monitors. List price for a NeXTdimension sold as an add-on to the NeXTcube was $US 3,995.
[edit] External links
- www.vamp.org/next/ Site for ND owners, featuring ND mailing list, ND faq and more
- NeXTComputers.org
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