[rescue] Graphics on a E450

[Joshua Boyd]

On 11/5/25 12:06, Dave McGuire via rescue wrote:
> On 11/3/25 18:52, Joshua D. Boyd via rescue wrote:
>>>> I received a decommissioned E450 from work. I don't see a frame 
>>>> buffer in it, so I guess it ran headless. The E450 falls into a gap 
>>>> in my experience with Sun (I left the first time in '97 and came 
>>>> back in '03). What graphics is supported and how does it compare to 
>>>> SS20 graphics? The System Handbook lists PGX, PGX32, PGX64, and 
>>>> Expert3D but I hadn't heard of any of those before I looked at that 
>>>> list.
>>>
>>>   It can definitely be done, but I'd have to wonder why one would 
>>> want that on a machine that is very clearly a server. I've worked 
>>> with a lot of E450s at a lot of sites, but I don't think I've ever 
>>> seen one with a framebuffer, so clearly I'm not the only person with 
>>> that opinion.
>>
>> Wasn’t there some sort of visualization workstation configuration of 
>> that with 3 or 4 Expert3D cards sold for driving a dataviz wall?  
>> That isn’t something you could do with a U80 at that time, to my 
>> understanding.
>>
>> Google says some people did this, but I can’t find if it was an 
>> official configuration option.
>
>   Oh man, that does sound like fun. 


So, when it the Large Scale System Museum going to get into large scale 
visualization systems?  Some large Onyx/Onyx 2 machines, a SkyWriter.  
V880z.  E&S.

I feel like HP and IBM should have been in on that to, but I'm not sure 
I can name anything off the top of my head.  Maybe an IBM 2250 attached 
to something suitable?