History of RIPs

1. First RIP was made in 1985 - The Adobe Redstone RIP used for the L101. 100 and L300, Motorola 68000/MHz, 2 MB  RAM and a 30MB or 60MB hard drive. Utilized 64k RAM chips. PostScript V42.5

2. 1987. The Adobe Atlas RIP 68020/16.7 MHz, (RIP2), 6 MB RAM, (Agfa RIP 9000, Vers 52.3), hard disk of 80MB SCSI. Utilized 256k RAM chips, (Lino used PostScript V51.8).

3. 1988. The Adobe Atlas Plus RIP. CPU 68020, (RIP3, Saturn) used 1 MB RAM chips, memory increased to 8MB 140MB SCSI.

4. 1989 Motorola 68020/25 MHz with 68882 coprocessor, (Lino, RIP4, Saturn Plus), (Agfa MAX Rip), 8MB RAM, 140MB SCSI, LIRA accelerator

5. 1990. Motorola 68030/33Mhz, (Lino, RIP30, Neptune) Agfa MAX Plus,RAM 8 or 16MB, LIRA accelerator, 170MB SCSI, Ethernet, LIRA. With Motorola 68030.50 MHz

6. 1992. The Adobe Emerald Agfa Star RIP, has a MIPS Computer Systems Inc., R3000 CPU/20Mhz, together with an R3010 floating point unit to speed arithmetic calculations. RAM increased to 16 MB later to 32 MB (Star SX), with hard drives increased to as high as 1050 MB in the Agfa Star 600.

7. 1991. Motorola 68040/25Mhz, later 33 MHz, Linotype RIP 40, (Neptune) 16 MB RAM, 170 MB hard disk. Followed by the 40XMO which had 64 MB RAM with a 425 MB SCSI hard disc, with the LIRA board replaced by an ASIC, (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) board called TurboPix.

8. 1992 Linotype RIP 50, (Jupiter Plus), MIPS R3000A CPU/40 MHz with an R3010A floating point unit. 48 MB RAM, 425 MB hard disk. Features PostScript level 2.

9. 1993 Linotype RIP 60. 3 Processors, Motorola 68040 for PostScript Interpretation, 68030 for system control, 68000 for output control. RIP60 XPO PostScript level 2.

10. 1994/1995 Industry trend to software RIPs Mainline companies offer CPSI, (Configurable PostScript Interpreter) which usually runs on a Pentium, Windows NT or Sparc Station platform. PostScript level 2.

Prepared by Fred Simper.