Aesthedes graphic designer's work station

UvA Computer Museum catalogue nr 05.01

The Aesthedes "Aesthetical Design" CAD/CAM system was designed and manufactured in 1982 by the Dutch company of Claessens Product Consultants for computer aided graphical and typographical (hence essentially 2D) design. It has been sold worldwide, causing a revolution in particular in advertisement design and in industrial applications such as the design of labels for beer bottles (see the picture).
The Aesthedes features a large desktop, mostly covered with touch-keys and a graphics tablet. The intention was to enable the designer to be creative without the need of any programming work.

The stand-alone system (no host computer required) had the following characteristics:

8 MC68000 processors, 2 Thomson EF9365 graphic display processors
1.9 Mb RAM, 2.4 Mb graphic memory (64 levels), 0.42 Mb PROM
20 Mb hard disk, two 8" 652 kb diskettes
Two 12" data displays, 24*80 chars, one of 18*64 chars
Three 20" colour displays (512*512 pixels, RS170 video input)
Weight, without colour monitors, 220 kg
Interfaces for: matrix printer, modem, plotter (drawing or cutting), Polaroid video printer, slide recorder, video camera
Optional: colour shading; stand alone rasterizer unit, unlimited resolution

The Aesthedes was donated in 2005 by the Museum of Modern Typography 'De Beijerd', Breda, The Netherlands.
The picture was taken from a sales data sheet.