The finished product was the first fully video-compatible frame buffer ever built. It was also a vector apart from the computer his colleagues had assembled in the basement. Where the Alto fit under a desk, Superpaint occupied two cabinets, each standing five feet tall and holding thirty-three memory cards. Its nearly two and a half million memory bits (in semiconductor chips worth about $100,000) meant that each pixel in a video frame with a resolution of 486 by 640 pixels could be addressed by eight bits. The system required two separate display monitors, one to show the image to be
...more
