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

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

 workstation

Workstation

A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...

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

Heidelberger Druckmaschinen

Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG is a German precision mechanical engineering company with head offices in Heidelberg . It is a manufacturer of offset printing presses sold globally. The company has a worldwide market share of more than 47% in this area and is the largest global manufacturer of...

 acquired Linotype-Hell in 1997. Heidelberg continued to update the software a few times before it was discontinued in April 2001.

Hardware

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

Motorola 68040

The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060. There was no 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 ....

 or 88110

Motorola 88000

The 88000 is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola. The 88000 was Motorola's attempt at a home-grown RISC architecture, started in the 1980s. The 88000 arrived on the market some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS...

 processors and several custom ASIC

ASIC

ASIC may refer to:* Application-specific integrated circuit, an integrated circuit developed for a particular use, as opposed to a customised general-purpose device.* ASIC programming language, a dialect of BASIC...

s. Later it was ported to SGI IRIX based "Sprint" systems. Optional hardware included a high-speed FDDI interface and a second Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

 controller.

Release history

Version	Hardware	O/S	Release date	Price	Significant changes (selected)
DaVinci 1.0	Dual 68040 based workstation	?	September 1992	?	Support for the "new" TIFF format
DaVinci 1.1	Dual 68040 based workstation	?	?	?	?
DaVinci 2.0	Dual 68040 based workstation	?	February 1994	?	CPU upgrade RAM Ram -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...  upgradeable to 64MB Export pages to the DCS Desktop Color Separations Desktop Colour Separation is an enhanced Encapsulated PostScript file format that was introduced by Quark, Inc. It is now primarily used for specialised graphics work particularly images that use multiple channels, eg when applying different spot colours to each part of a greyscale... , ICS Image Cytometry Standard The Image Cytometry Standard is a digital multidimensional image file format used in life sciences microscopy. It stores not only the image data, but also the microscopic parameters describing the optics during the acquisition....  and IFEN formats Export silhouetted images to the DCS and ICS file formats Enhanced colour-manipulation tools LCH colour wheel added for colour-selection
DaVinci 2.5	Dual 68040 based workstation	?	May 1994	?	New PostScript PostScript PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...  workflows Performance enhancements in vector handling New trapping features Archiving to the LinoServer using FDDI Enhanced assembly and colour manipulation
DaVinci 2.6	Dual 68040 based workstation	?	?	?	?
DaVinci 3.0	Dual 68040 ("Classic") or dual 50 MHz 88110 ("Power") based workstations	?	1995	$140.000 (w/88110)	?
DaVinci 4.0	?	?	Spring 1996	?	Text editor 8bit masks
DaVinci 4.2	?	IRIX 6.2	?	?	?
DaVinci 5.1	SGI O2 SGI O2 The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 used a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart was the SGI Octane...	?	?	?	?
DaVinci 6.0	SGI O2 SGI O2 The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 used a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart was the SGI Octane...	?	?	?	?