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Quantel DPB-7001 'Classic' Paintbox

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dexters_lab:
Looking into the hardware of the original DPB 'Classic' Paintbox, this is quite an amazing bit of hardware and i believe to be historically important both in the computing and tv history fields.

The DPB-7000/1 was the first 'paintbox', introduced at NAB in 1981 and cost £120,000 although it wasn't the first video painting system it was the most influential and a huge success for Quantel allowing artists to create TV graphics without the use of physical drawings, letraset and rostrum cameras it also allowed the editing of stills taken from existing video. When combined with the later systems like Encore, Mirage and Harry it formed a hugely powerful system able to perform multi-layer video compositing in the mid 1980s.

The paintbox system is a 7U rack unit containing connection ports and PSU in the rear and a bay of cards in the front. The system is controlled by a Motorola 68000 CPU with ROM and RAM spread across two computer cards. The software is contained in EPROM and has 512kb of working RAM. The remaining cards which are mostly based on 74x series logic, bit-slice processors along with a small number of programmable logic devices like PAL/GALs perform the painting operations, framestores, video input and output and disk interfacing etc. The two framestores contain nearly 4Mb RAM which for 1981 was a considerable amount! Video input and output is analog Composite PAL or RGB+Sync at full frame resolution (PAL 720*576)

Peripherals include a large drawing tablet with a wired pen, 8" floppy drive, 14" hard disk and a keyboard

Hopefully if the psu doesn't go bang on me, i'll be posting progress as i try and get some life out of this machine...

oPossum:

Zbig:

--- Quote from: oPossum on February 21, 2019, 03:41:35 pm ---

--- End quote ---

Urm, yeah, Mark/dexters_lab is the guy who was Retro Man Cave guy's host in that video... ;)

oPossum:

--- Quote from: Zbig on February 22, 2019, 09:07:59 pm ---Urm, yeah, Mark/dexters_lab is the guy who was Retro Man Cave guy's host in that video... ;)

--- End quote ---

Urm, yeah, that is why it is posted in this thread.

Zbig:

--- Quote from: oPossum on February 22, 2019, 09:45:07 pm ---Urm, yeah, that is why it is posted in this thread.

--- End quote ---

Ok, fair enough ;) It seemed as if you were providing OP another source of information on the subject. That's why it helps to put a word or two of context/explanation instead of just dropping a link :)

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