[deleted]
The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
21–30 of 127 posts
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#22[deleted]
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#23During my internship, I worked at Evans and Sutherland, which was just off of the University of Utah tech park and was a major part of the UoU graphics world. I worked on what I think was the last generation of E&S image generators. It was pretty cool, especially the realtime phong shading (this was the 1990s!) and calligraphic lighting (sort of like a vector display that overdrew the normal displays and made things like point lights look incredible!) in the actual flight simulators.
The company was visibly dying at the time and I didn't take their offer to join, I just had other plans, but the engineers were incredibly welcoming. One of the people I worked with went on to be an imagineer. I with I had not lost touch with them, the guy I reported to was a great guy.
It was just an amazing place, but the writing was on the wall. GPUs were just starting and I looked at the rack full of gear that was the image generator and thought: yeah, this is all going away soon. That was, in fact, exactly what happened.
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#24That's why you see this at the computer history museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy
Further immortalized through the 418 I'm a Teapot HTTP error code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
AFAIK, the 418 status is more a reference to coffee making than to the Utah Teapot.
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#25I attended the High School Computing Institute in the summer of 2002 in the CS department (before attending and majoring in physics). I did more graphics with alpha_1 although there was a simulated cassini rover in lisp program there. It was a bunch of fun. I graduated from there but switched to physics because it was easier than EE, and I didn’t think I wanted to do CS.
Christopher Johnson did some of the graphics program, which was most memorable.
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#26The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all. My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are…
There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet.
Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the first places on the planet to have the "Internet".
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#27That's why you see this at the computer history museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy
I was totally expecting to see the teapot on the page.
The photo does have Martin Newell in it who created the famous model.
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#28First shape I 3D printed was the Utah teapot.
Back in the 80s there was a fantastic spool of renders which occasionally featured the teapot anachronistically flying through landscapes and effect showcases as a little private motif.
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#29The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/ On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all. My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are…
> Details are .. not retrievable from the dead
You inherited your dad's British humour :)
Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
#30Basically the entire foundation of computer graphics is within a couple degrees of separation of the guys in that photo.