NeXTdimension

NeXTdimension (ND) was an accelerated 32-bit color board manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 that gave the NeXTcube color capabilities with PostScript. The NeXTBus, a NuBus like implementation card was a full size card for the NeXTcube, filling one of four slots, another one being filled with the main board itself. The NeXTdimension featured S-Video input and output, RGB output, an Intel i860 64-bit RISC processor at 33MHz for Postscript acceleration, 8-32MB RAM main memory and 4MB VRAM for a resolution of 1120*832 at 24-bit color plus 8-bit alpha channel. An onboard C-Cube CL550 chip for MJPEG video compression was announced, but never shipped. A handful of engineering prototypes for the MJPEG daughterboard exist, but none actually function.

A stripped down Mach kernel was used as the operating system for the card. Due to the supporting processor 32-bit color Display PostScript on the NeXTdimension was faster than 2-bit grayscale Display PostScript on the NeXTcube. Since the main board always included the grayscale video logic, adding a NeXTdimension allowed the simultaneous use of two monitors. List price for a NeXTdimension sold as an add-on to the NeXTcube was $US 3,995.

External links

• www.vamp.org/next/ Site for ND owners, featuring ND mailing list, ND faq and more
• NeXTComputers.org