Linotype-Hell DaVinci was an image manipulation program targeted at the repro and print shop markets. It originally ran on proprietary hardware, but was later ported to

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

s. The first version was released in 1993, and it continued to see regular releases until

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...

acquired

Linotype-Hell The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufactu ...

in 1997. Heidelberg continued to update the software a few times before it was discontinued in April 2001, but the core engines for trapping and color management were recoded to work on PDF files and were a key contributor to the commercial success of Prinergy, whic
benefitted
from the Heidelberg-Creo joint venture.

Development

Hardware

DaVinci originally ran on proprietary "Power" workstations with dual 68040 or

88110 The MC88110 was a microprocessor developed by Motorola that implemented the 88000 instruction set architecture (ISA). The MC88110 was a second-generation implementation of the 88000 ISA, succeeding the MC88100. It was designed for use in personal ...

processors and several custom ASICs. Later it was ported to

SGI IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extension ...

based "Sprint" systems. Optional hardware included a high-speed

FDDI Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) is a standard for data transmission in a local area network. It uses optical fiber as its standard underlying physical medium, although it was also later specified to use copper cable, in which case it m ...

interface and a second

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

controller. The DaVinci name was the second choice during its development. Internally, it was known as "Chagall", named after the artist. However, permission could not be obtained to use his name. In the early days of Photoshop and Apple Macintosh hardware, rotation and scaling of large digital images taxed those machines to the limit, often taking several minutes to complete. In a high-end colour shop the Davinci performed these manipulations and many others with ease and in seconds, especially on the proprietary hardware. It was also equipped with a calibrated colour monitor.

Release history

References

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Development

Hardware

Release history

See also

References