Imlac

» see imlac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Imlac Corporation was founded in 1968 in Needham, Massachusetts, to sell interactive graphics terminals to stock exchange traders. Wikipedia's timeline disposes of that plan in four words: which did not happen. What it built anyway was the PDS-1, a Programmable Display System introduced in 1969 and shown that year at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.

The PDS-1 was unusual in a specific way. Most small computers of 1969 drove a teleprinter or a character terminal. This one had a vector display and a processor of its own, so it could sit on a line to a mainframe as a graphics terminal and also run programs by itself when nobody was feeding it. That combination is why it ended up in research labs instead of on trading floors.

The line kept going for a decade. A PDS-2 arrived in 1970 and a PDS-1D in 1972. The PDS-4 of 1973 ran at twice the speed and is the volume machine, with around seven hundred sold in the United States by 1977. A PDS-1G followed in 1974, and in 1978 the catalog moved to the Dynagraphic name with the 3205 at the bottom and the 6210 and 6220 above it. Then Hazeltine bought the company in 1979.

~ the chronicle ~

~ nine thousand four hundred and fifty dollars ~

That was the single-unit price of a PDS-1 in 1969, falling to $6,545 apiece if you were ordering in quantity. The size of that discount tells you who Imlac expected to be selling to, which is sites buying several at a time rather than a person buying one. The Atlas Computing Division's trip reports from 1976 and 1978 read them as part of the furniture of American research computing by then. Nobody bought one for the reason Imlac had originally written down.

~ the maze on two linked pds-1s ~

In 1973 three students on a school work placement at NASA Ames were given the job of drawing computational fluid dynamics results on PDS-1s. Steve Colley wrote a maze you could walk through in the first person. Howard Palmer and Greg Thompson then extended it so two people could play at once by cabling two PDS-1s together, and the thing was eventually networked out to eight of the machines being used as graphical terminals. That game is Maze, filed under Maze War by nearly everyone who has written about it since.

The same display turned up in the other direction too. RFC 191, from July 1971, is Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center writing up how it did graphics. Two years later a Xerox PARC technical report by James Mitchell described the implementation of NLS, the system the mouse came out of, on a minicomputer. The Imlac article cites both.

A company that could not sell to traders ended up supplying the screen for two of the foundational demonstrations of interactive computing and for the game the first-person shooter is usually traced back to. None of that was in the product plan, and the revenue from it was the purchase orders.

~ hazeltine ~

Hazeltine Corporation made text-only terminals, so the 1979 purchase looks like a reasonable fit on paper and was a dead end in practice. The Imlac name survived as a Hazeltine product line long enough for an Imlac Dynagraphic Series II to be introduced in 1981, and then it stops appearing. There is no closure announcement to point at, because by that stage there was no independent company left to close.

imlac.com today is a HugeDomains sales page. What is actually left is paper and code. The PDS-1 technical manual and the full set of logic drawings are scanned at bitsavers, with the PDS-4 programming card at DigiBarn. In 2013 Josh Dersch wrote an emulator called sImlac, so the software written for a machine whose best-known model sold around seven hundred units can be run again on anything.

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