tem displayed on a huge 19" color monitor. The SPARCstation 1 also had an optical mouse rather than a mechanical one, and built-in ethernet networking. The operating system was SunOS, Sun's version of BSD UNIX. This was later replaced with Solaris, Sun's version of SVR4 UNIX.Sun sold lots of SPARCstation systems and made the words SPARCstation and workstation synonymous in many people's minds. Engineers and scientists loved them and looked no further for a very long time. A whole range of bigger and better SPARCstation models, including clones, appeared on the market over the next few years, making SPARC the second major platform to use cloning to keep prices down (the IBM PC was the first, of course).Silicon Graphics IRIS - The Birth of 3D GraphicsIn 1989, Silicon Graphics introduced what was [arguably] the first 3D graphics workstation, the IRIS 4D Superworkstation. It was based on the MIPS RISC architecture, but its real innovation was its high end 3D graphics system, including a 24-bit double buffered extremely high resolution (1280x1024) display, with Z buffering and Gouraud shading in hardware!The high end GTX graphics system had 5 custom 3D geometry processors and 5 pixel rendering processors which ran in parallel. It could render over 100,000 3D shaded triangles per second, which made it fast enough for interactive 3D solid modeling. And all the 3D graphics hardware was at a programmers disposal through the IRIS's wonderful GL 3D graphics library.The only problem was the price - the IRIS 4D was really, really expensive! Responding to requests for a lower cost version, Silicon Graphics brought out a Personal IRIS which had cut-down features but was still capable of interactive 3D wireframe and limited solids modeling. The Personal IRIS still wasn't cheap, but for many graphics professionals it was reachable.The IRIS series and its descendants, together with the GL graphics library and its OpenGL descendant, went on to dominate th...
