Update 2007 - I understand they have finally replaced the Ikonas 3000 systems with PC-based graphics.
| News - Still useful after 25 years! We introduced the Ikonas 3000 in
1980 and as of July 2005 there were at least 5 systems still in daily use
(driving cockpit displays in the USAF B-1
Cockpit Procedures Trainer).
Update 2007 - I understand they have finally replaced the Ikonas 3000 systems with PC-based graphics. |
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July 1998 Demo- Thanks to Garret Dunn (former Ikonas engineer) and Bill Cowan (University of Waterloo - "Graveyard of the Ikonas boxes"), Mary and I exhibited a working Ikonas system at the 25th anniversary SIGGRAPH conference in Orlando in July 1998. We ran the "accept" microcode demo, hosted by our original Heathkit LSI-11 with an 8" floppy disk drive. Worked perfectly the whole show. We essentially recreated our SIGGRAPH '81 booth with some signs, posters, and demo video tape. We also showed the NYIT Ikonas demo reel thanks to Paul Heckbert. Lots of old Ikonas customers came by to say hello, including one who still uses his 15 year old system regularly. |
| Customer List - We put together an Ikonas customer list for the SIGGRAPH retrospective. Please e-mail me with any additions or corrections. |
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History - Ikonas Graphics Systems Inc. was founded in 1978 by Mary Whitton and me,
based on work I did as a grad student at North Carolina State University
in the Computer Graphics Lab headed by Prof. John
Staudhammer.
As part of a project funded by NASA Langley Research Center, I had developed a programmable raster display system for cockpit instrumentation display. (See my paper in SIGGRAPH 78). Several people expressed interest in acquiring something similar so Mary and I started Ikonas to make a commercial version. Robert Whitton was a partner in the business from the beginning and later Pete Evans and Henry Rich became partners also. At one point Ikonas had around 50 employees in Raleigh NC. |
Architecture - Ikonas concentrated on developing flexible, programmable, high end graphics
and imaging hardware for research groups. The system was based around a 32
bit data, 24 bit address bus into which various boards could be plugged.
Everything within the system was memory mapped into this 24 bit address space.
A host interface was provided with address registers to access anything on
the bus.
Major elements of the Ikonas system were a flexible frame buffer for display
and a micro-programmable graphics processor for performing graphics and imaging functions.
The frame buffer resolution and timing could be set via control registers.
The graphics processor included 32 bit integer ALU and 16x16 bit integer multiplier
along with address counters, loop counters and the like, all controlled by
a 64 bit instruction word.
Other plug-in boards developed during the lifetime of the system include:
We developed a great deal of microcode, covering 3-D graphics, image processing,
seismic data display, flight simulation, ray tracing, and solid modeling.
Misc. photos:
| Hardware | 
Dave Sieg's collection of systems left over from Omnibus |
 DR64B frame buffer board - about 15" x 15" 128 16K DRAM chips - Displayed 512x512x8 or 1024x1024x2 Twelve boards needed for a 1024x1024x24 full color system. Later versions (DR256) had 128 64K DRAM chips |
 DR64B wire-wrap side. This one is machine-wrapped. Earlier ones were hand-wrapped. Later ones were multi-layer printed circuit. |
| Solid-3000 Microcode Package |
Teapot display at the Computer Museum in Boston 1985-89? On the right was a display driven by an Ikonas RDS-3000 running our Solid-3000 microcode, with adaptive subdivision B-spline patch rendering. Press the "RENDER" button and the Ikonas would re-render with shading to match the physical lights. Photo courtesy of Steve Baker & his Utah Teapot site |
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| Seismic-3000 Microcode Package |
Interactive 3D volume slicing of seismic data. |
"Wiggle Trace" display - curves drawn directly in microcode from seismic data
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Sub-surface display using transparent surfaces |
| IDL2 Microcode Package |
Real time display for cockpit instrumentation |
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| Customers | 
Z-buffer solid display code by our first customer - UT Health Science Center-Dallas |
Paul Hauge at Phillips |
Customers - Customers got a microcode compiler (and later, several C compilers were
available) and were strongly encouraged (!) to develop their own code. They
came up with all sorts of interesting and imaginative ways to use the system.
Ikonas gear was used for the "Genesis Planet Sequence" in Star Trek:The Wrath
of Khan, for the video games in Superman III and for a bunch of TV commercials,
as well as for a lot of serious scientific and engineering work.
From "Life Before the Chips: Simulating Digital Video Interactive Technology"
by Douglas F. Dixon. Communications of the ACM, July 1989, pp 824-831.
"From our first Ikonas system delivered in November 1981, this remarkably
powerful and flexible machine was a major part of our success in communicating
the vision of DVI, and nurturing it until the chips arrived in December 1987.
Some of that flexibility and power also lives on in its influence on the
design of the DVI chip set. The more expressive the simulation environment
for a product concept, the more ideas can be explored and prototyped for
the final design, and the more likely that features of the simulation system
become incorporated in the product."
From "Hardware Support for Multitasking Graphics" by William Cowan, Christopher
Wein, Marcelli Wein, Kellogg S. Booth. Graphics Interface '91 proceedings,
June 1991, pp 199-206.
"Finally, it is interesting to note that the interface construction discussed
in this paper and the further enhancements discussed in this last section
are easy to carry out in the [Ikonas] RDS-3000, a decade old design. Its
flexibility, modularity, and openness make it possible to design and substitute
components in a way that cannot be done with newer designs offering higher
graphics performance at the cost of closed hardware. Systems like the RDS-3000
may be unsuitable for the production graphics that makes up the vast bulk
of the market, but they are the life blood of laboratories that conduct research
into new techniques for combining computation and graphics."
Further Info - For some more info on the system, see an article I wrote in the January 1986
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine. Also see Tim Van Hook's
SIGGRAPH 86 paper covering some amazing real-time solid modeling microcode
he wrote for the Ikonas.
Epilogue - Ikonas was acquired by Adage Inc in 1982 and the Ikonas system continued
to be marketed as the Adage 3000 Raster Display System. I'd guess almost
400 systems were sold before Adage finally pulled the plug around 1987. As of
7/05 at least five are still in daily use, a minor miracle in the
computer business.
There were lots of great people who were part of Ikonas and we had lots of
great (and patient) customers. Thanks for the wonderful experience.
