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Three Rivers / ICL Perq
Intran Metaform was probably the biggest application for the Perq.
Intran Metaform was a suite of applications that included
-
Form Builder - a graphical application for designing and printing forms.
-
Font Builder - used to customize fonts.
-
Graphics Builder - a drawing program with many advanced features.
These were used in conjunction with laser printers to generate high quality
output.
Some companies such as Intran built their systems using the PERQ
The display of the Intran system running on a Perq. These are from
a video
available over at the Digibarn.
Intran eventually moved their products to the Sun workstation.
Finally, the "Perq 3" was a complete redesign based around the Motorola
68020 CPU.
The system was built by ICL and included:.
-
A 68020 + 68881 CPU.
-
1 or 2 Megabytes of memory.
-
A SCSI disk interface and hard drive.
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Landscape Monitor
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An opto-mechanical mouse
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ICL keyboard
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5.25" floppy disk drive
After this the Perq faded away as it was over taken by competition from
Sun, Apple, and others.
Another piece of interesting trivia: James Golsling, the "father of
Java" got the original concept for the Java VM from a program he wrote
to port some software from a Perq by translating Perq Q-Code to VAX assembler
and emulating the hardware.
Conclusion: while the Perq existed mainly on the merits of its hardware,
the machine served as a testbed for GUI applications and clearly demonstrated
what GUI machines could do.
