Evans & Sutherland provides optimized OpenGL technology for Solaris

Business Wire, Sept 18, 1995

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 1995--Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation (NASDAQ:ESCC) today announced that it will provide OpenGL core technology to SunSoft Inc.

SunSoft earlier announced plans to provide native OpenGL on Solaris for SPARC, Intel and PowerPC platforms and has now chosen to use the optimized E&S technology for these solutions. The Sun Solaris platform is currently the leading UNIX environment with an installed base of over 2 million users and the largest installed base of graphics users in the industry.

SunSoft has chosen the E&S OpenGL technology because of the significant performance advantage over the sample implementation code provided by Silicon Graphics. E&S has invested well over 20 man years completely rewriting OpenGL code and optimizing it for speed.

SunSoft's choice of E&S OpenGL technology to satisfy the Solaris market is a clear indication of Evans & Sutherland's continuing leadership in technical graphics solutions.

"After evaluating the options, SunSoft chose to adopt E&S leadership technology as the basis of our native OpenGL offering," said Paula Sager, vice president of Desktop Technology at SunSoft. "This enables SunSoft to provide our OpenGL product to our customers much more quickly."

"Evans & Sutherland continues to provide exceptional 3D graphics technology to our partners. First we provided Sun with the fastest graphics accelerators in the industry and now with our OpenGL technology we are helping Sun take its graphics solutions into new and expanding markets," said Jim Oyler, president and CEO of Evans & Sutherland.

In addition to the advanced technology of the OpenGL API, users of OpenGL-enabled systems will also benefit from an increased variety of applications and platform configurations. Developers can lower development and support costs by using a common API and developing applications for a higher-volume delivery platform such as Solaris. SunSoft's OpenGL implementation will leverage Solaris' strengths of a fully scalable, multi-threaded and multiplatform architecture.

OpenGL is of particular importance to graphics intensive markets such as seismic exploration, visualization, automotive styling, animation and defense.

In a related release today, Portable Graphics, an Evans & Sutherland subsidiary, announced that it has reduced the price of OpenGL development licenses for Sun workstations to $295.

SunSoft Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems Inc., with offices worldwide. SunSoft's charter is to design, market, sell and support the industry's highest-quality software environment to enable businesses to gain a competitive advantage through information systems.

SunSoft delivers a suite of solutions that easily and cost-effectively connect, integrate and manage large enterprise environments. The products are licensed by SunSoft and distributed through major computer manufacturers and resellers worldwide. The SunSoft Web page is located at http://www.sun.com/sunsoft/.>Evans & Sutherland is a leader in advanced 3D graphics and visualization systems for science, industry, education and entertainment. The Graphics Systems Group provides graphics hardware and software solutions that are sold and supported by Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Graphics Systems also provides 3D graphics hardware and software for the personal computer. Evans & Sutherland was founded in 1968 and is based in Salt Lake City. The E&S Web page is located at http://www.es.com. -0-

Note to Editors: Sun Microsystems, Sun, SunSoft and Solaris are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark exclusively licensed through X/Open Co. Ltd. All other products or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

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Jennifer Hughes, 801/588-1451

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Debbie Young, 415/968-4033