Intergraph TD-4 Workstation
The TD-4 is a mid-1990s high-end “Pizza Box” or desktop-form-factor workstation produced by Intergraph. Intergraph is noteworthy for a few reasons; first, it was a major player in the CAD workstation space as early as the 1980s, second, it helped propel Windows-based CAD to become the de-facto industry standard, and finally, as is well known Carmack used a very-widescreen Intergraph monitor to write “Doom”.
The TD-4 is a good representation of where the high-end graphics market was going in the mid-1990s. The hegemony of Unix workstations were being challenged by Intel’s dominance of the low-end of the market, and x86 commodity hardware was reaching price:performance ratios that started to challenge SGI/Sun’s dominance in that area. The Pentium Pro would signal a major shift that would place SGI and the RISC market in general on a downward trajectory in the late 1990s that would not be reversed until a decade later with the rise in mobile computing.
This machine is unusally well kitted-out and likely received some upgrades during its service life. It contains two Pentium 90 processors, 128 MB of RAM across 8 16MB modules, and two Weitek P9100 graphics cards allowing for a dual-display setup. My unit contains a 2GB Seagate disk (not factory installed) and CDROM drive both interfaced with over 50-pin SCSI via an Adaptec chipset. All of this is out-of-box compatible with the Windows NT 3.51 HCL with the exception of the Weitek cards.
The quality of the overall build is quite-good to exceptional compared to most x86 hardware at the time. Purchase price is hard to cite directly based on this configuration, but likely was around $15000 at initial release.
Usable space is maximized in the build despite the large cards. Everything is easily accessible and replaceable as you would expect from a high-end workstation of this period.
A few years ago I was able to locate the Weitek P9100 Intergraph dual-head display driver after many hours searching the internet archive as well as some other resources. Reach out if I can be of help to you refurbishing one of these.
