Once again, it has been a ridiculously long time since I posted anything here, and I haven’t been doing much of anything directly related to astronomy or astrophotography, except my ongoing and time consuming work of manufacturing my products for astrophotography.  But I’ve been thinking about how I got here and decided to share some thoughts.

My Power*Star design is, in several ways, the most sophisticated product that I can call my own design, and it was an amazing accomplishment to complete it with the short schedule and limited resources I had, but if you look at the amount of work and ingenuity involved, it pales in comparison to the TurboPGA project I did back in the mid 1980s.

In the early 1980s IBM introduced the PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter), and I worked for the company that designed it for them.  I didn’t work on that design, actually, as I was the manager of the small group that was continuing the company’s pre-IBM business.  But I decided that some interesting new technology called VRAM (Video Random Access Memory) would make it possible to greatly increase the performance of the PGA while reducing the cost.  So I left that company and struck out on my own, eventually selling the idea to Orchid Technology, a leading manufacturer (at the time) of network and graphics adapters for IBM PCs.  Graphics adapters of that era were nothing like today’s technology, which includes full 3D processing and gigabytes of memory to render ultra high resolution video in real time.  The PGA’s resolution was just 640×480 in 256 colors.  But people were so accustomed to the poor quality graphics that were the norm at the time (CGA and EGA, if you remember such terms) that visitors at trade shows frequently told me that the display looked like a color photograph.  It didn’t really, but in comparison to the standard PC graphics of the day, it was quite remarkable.

The board had an 80186 processor, and employed a large number of PAL (Programmable Array Logic) devices to accelerate the rendering of graphics.  The TurboPGA sold for about half the price of the IBM product, and had roughly 5 times the performance.  But most impressive, perhaps, was that it was developed more quickly and with a small fraction of the development budget.  Some of that was because of the newer technology, including the VRAM, and the fact that I didn’t have to define the features, I just had to make them the same as or compatible with the original PGA design.  There were a couple of people who helped with the embedded software, but I wrote most of it myself, and did all of the hardware design.  One of the guys who had been a key person in the team that did the design for IBM had also left the company and moved to California.  He agreed to do alpha and beta testing for me on the TurboPGA and gave me some great feedback.  Not too many years later that guy became a founder and CTO of nVidia, which has been a worldwide leader in computer graphics since then.

I have lots of stories about working in Silicon Valley, but they have nothing to do with astrophotography, and I don’t want to wander too far away from the purpose of this blog.  The Hubble Space Telescope didn’t even launch until 1990, and astrophotography was absolutely primitive in comparison to what even amateurs can do today.  Can you imagine the response if I had been able to display Hubble-like images when showing the TurboPGA?