Evans & Sutherland PS390 graphics processor

UvA Computer Museum catalogue nr 04.73

In the late 1980's, the PS390 was, at a 5-figure (US$) price and a weight of 55 kg, one of the most advanced graphics systems available. It was usually operated with a PDP11 or VAX mini as host computer. Today, such a system couldn't really compete with an everyday desktop computer equipped with a plug-in graphics processor and a suitable monitor.
Here are some of the salient features of the PS390:

Real-time interaction through keyboard, data tablet, function buttons unit, control dials, optical mouse
Control processor: 68000 @ 10 MHz
512 Kb firmware, 2 Mb user memory
Proprietary display processor for pipelined matrix transformations, clipping, anti-aliasing, character generation, etc
(Probably) 6 bitplanes for color representation etc
Effective image quality 8192*6912 on 1024*864 raster display through subpixel processing
Software (running on the host computer) distributed as Fortran, Pascal or C source code

The PS390 has been used by the Laboratory of Crystallography, University of Amsterdam. Thanks to Jan Fraanje for saving it from being scrapped.
The picture (taken from a data sheet) shows the monitor and some interaction devices. The refrigerator-sized Logic Cabinet and the host computer are not visible.