Talk:Line Drawing System-1

Important device
This was a significant machine - the first display device with geometry pipelines, or at least one pipeline, with the 16 multipliers of a graphics processor. (That hardware took a mainframe-sized cabinet.) It didn't have "fill"; that came in with the Evans and Sutherland Picture System. --John Nagle (talk) 05:24, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Brochure
The photo in the brochure shows 3 full height 19" racks. The block diagram shows a Character Generator, Matrix Multiplier, Clipping Divider and Line Generator - all connected to a mainframe computer by a Channel Controller. A typical mainframe of the era would have been a SDS Sigma series Sigma 7 (which is what was used with the LDS-1 at NASA Ames).

The designation "LDS" was a pun on the predominant religion in Utah - most of the employees were members of the LDS Church. Mccainre (talk) 19:06, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Repaired article
Added a block diagram of the system, redrawn from the original. Found original DARPA progress report on the project and linked it. Pointed out that this was the first machine with a graphics processing unit, so it's notable. (It took several racks of hardware back then.) John Nagle (talk) 20:16, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Esports
A case can be made the MIT LDS-1 was involved in early Esports. A program would display an ongoing MAZE game. Dave Lebling wrote on GitHub, "in one room was the E&S LDS-1: the Evans and Sutherland graphics computer that was wired into the 10 as well. Tak To wrote a "Maze Watcher" that ran on the E&S and let you snoop on ongoing Maze matches: an early anticipation of eSports..." https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1420#issuecomment-479060676 Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 10:34, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

"First"?
The Vector General machines shipped around the same time as the LDS, and definitely had a GPU. I am not sure of this claim, it needs further backing. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:42, 2 June 2020 (UTC)