A graphical display system utilizing plasma panels

摘要

A graphics display system utilizing recently available 512 line plasma panels interfaced to a DEC PDP-11 computer will be described. As the panel electronics allow one cell to be turned on or off each 20 µs the required display processor functions are implemented in software with no loss of performance. This results in a display system with a rich instruction set as the entire PDP-11 instruction set becomes part of the graphics instruction set. Since the plasma panels combine both memory and selective erase, a unique capability has thus been achieved.