NeXTdimension was an accelerated 32-bit

32-bit

The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....

 color board manufactured and sold by NeXT

NeXT

Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...

 from 1990 that gave the NeXTcube

NeXTcube

The NeXTcube was a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 until 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and was housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure. The workstation ran the NeXTSTEP operating system.- Hardware :The...

 color capabilities with PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

. 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

S-Video

Separate Video, more commonly known as S-Video and Y/C, is often referred to by JVC as both an S-VHS connector and as Super Video. It is an analog video transmission scheme, in which video information is encoded on two channels: luma and chroma...

 input and output, RGB output, an Intel i860

Intel i860

The Intel i860 was a RISC microprocessor from Intel, first released in 1989. The i860 was one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set since the failed Intel i432 from the 1980s...

 64-bit

64-bit

64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s...

 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

MJPEG

In multimedia, Motion JPEG is an informal name for a class of video formats where each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is separately compressed as a JPEG image...

 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

Mach (kernel)

Mach is an operating system kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. Although Mach is often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, not all versions of Mach are microkernels...

 was used as the operating system for the card. Due to the supporting processor 32-bit color Display PostScript

Display PostScript

Display PostScript is an on-screen display system. As the name implies, DPS uses the PostScript imaging model and language to generate on-screen graphics...

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