The 1981 Quantel Paintbox was years ahead of the competition
It could create real-time broadcast quality video in 16 million colours yet only had a 330Mb hard drive. It was a giant, custom built graphics accelerator, running proprietary software that the user didn't ever see because the complete digital studio could be navigated and everything could be created using Quantel's newly-invented and patented pressure-sensitive stylus.
The programming tools to build the classic DPB software were Oregon Pascal and a Quantel Linker, written by following an earlier Oregon Linker. Pascal was a teaching language known for its lack of complexity, while demonstrating computer science principles of the time. The Quantel products are interesting examples of how you could build reliable, medium-sized systems and Pascal's simplicity helped avoid too many complex tricks.
The Paintbox was a closed system of software and hardware (the same concept as Apple, who Quantel predate) but Director of R&D Paul Kellar suggests we should consider the Paintbox, not as two seperate elements but as one unified object he calls 'firmware', in the same way an engine and body working together make a 'car', not an 'engine and body'.
We asked a former Quantel field engineer for 33 years to explain in layman's terms how his recently restored DPB70001, the last fully working classic Paint Box in the world, actually works.
This is the rack of cards and three examples
The cards are not only beautifully engineered to squeeze the most out of every component,
and, despite being conceptualized and launched in less than a year by a small company based in the English countryside (tech giant Apple's iPhone took three years), they were incredibly reliable. Most Paintboxes were left running continuously, with The Weather Channel stating in 1990 that, except for a few minutes to install software upgrades, they hadn't turned off their 1982 Paintbox for 8 years!