"CatEyes" was a family of three separate graphics boards based on hardware developed by Intergraph.  The Intergraph graphics technology was later spun-off as Intense3D, and ultimately acquired by 3DLabs.

The combination of compute performance, graphics performance and competitive pricing made Alpha workstations with CatEyes graphics extremely successful.  Sales increased dramatically, new applications were ported, and Digital became a significant player in the graphics workstation market that had been dominated by SGI.  In less than a year, penetration of 3D graphics on Digital workstations more than tripled, and the revenues of these graphics cards alone exceeded $12 million.

Digital was the first outside customer for Intergraph graphics technology.  Digital offered the CatEyes graphics on Alpha workstations, complement (rather than competing with) Intergraph's own Intel-based workstations.

My first responsibility was to negotiate the contract with Intergraph.  This proved challenging, as this was the first time Intergraph had sold portions of their core technology externally.  They had substantial concerns about intellectual property and the potential to "compete with themselves."  After numerous revisions and intense negotiations, the contract was signed and proved successful for both companies.

Sales were considerably greater than originally forecast.  We had to work closely with Intergraph to increase deliveries.  The major challenge was in the long lead times for key semiconductor components.  We had to come up with creative approaches for dealing with cost and liability issues that were acceptable to both Intergraph and Digital.  We finally developed a "play or pay" model based on committed forecasts.  Under this approach, Digital agreed to pay time based penalties for canceling or reducing orders.  Essentially, Digital became responsible for costs incurred in fulfilling the order, beginning with materials costs for long lead items and culminating in a period of time in which the order could not be cancelled.  This approach addressed Intergraph's concerns about cost exposure and allowed the relationship to proceed.  As it turned out, Digital had to repeatedly increase orders, not cancel them.

CatEyes was breakthrough technology.  It represented the first graphics subsystems capable of performance exceeding 1 million triangles per second, hardware accelerated texture mapping (with fill rates up to 38 Megatexals per second), high resolution display -- and a price tag of less than $10,000.

While vastly greater performance is available today -- at prices ranging from $100 to $500 -- CatEyes was revolutionary in terms of capabilities, performance and price when it was introduced.

CatEyes technology was delivered through three separate products:

• PowerStorm 4D60T: High resolution (up to 1920x1080), large textures, superb stereo display (quad buffered at 1280x1024)
  

 

• PowerStorm 4D50T: Same performance as 4D60T but lower resolution (1280x1024 max).
  

 

• PowerStorm 4D40T: Same capabilities as the 4D50T and identical appearance, but delivered lower performance at a lower cost.