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The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

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Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#41

Post by jb1991 »

elliotec wrote: post #18

The 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…

1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families with internet in their house by 1992.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#42

Post by McKayDavis »

elliotec wrote: post #18

The 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…

East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).

The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.

After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.

Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#43

Post by herewulf »

elliotec wrote: post #18

The 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…

The U of U still has a large block of public IPs that they use for all their "internal" systems. No need for NAT there!

That was at least 100% true as of around 15 years ago. I know the CS and engineering departments are still using that block. Hard to imagine that it still holds true for WiFi APs, etc and the proliferation of devices.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#44

Post by nologic01 »

Computer graphics has always been a world apart in computing. Even today we still have the somewhat arcane world of GPU's versus the CPU's for the common folk.

Programming-wise too, computer graphics, especially 3D, has this pronounced mathematical / geometric aspect to it that is not shared with normal applications. That has been inhereted in the game industry but remains a thing apart.

In some sense it is only now, half a century later, with the increased emphasis on data science and ML/AI that this fundamental cleavage is being repaired:

Both at the hardware side, the repurposing and utilization of GPU architectures for non-graphical compute and on the software side, the elevation of more mathematical objects like tensors (= nd-arrays) into first class citizens.

Some of that disjointness might have been unavoidable, but maybe these guys (remarkably 100% male btw) in the family photo had something to do with it.

The counterfactual would have been something like graphics enabled CPU's and more mainstream support in programming languages for the associated mathematical operations.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#45

Post by prpl »

McKayDavis wrote: post #39
s1mon wrote: post #16

Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally written in Lisp. Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it described the relation between s…

Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S. CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler. After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept. I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping…

When was that?

I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended up making a 3D Model of Escher’s Belvedere. One of the guys was going to “print” it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375 at the time.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#46

Post by Banditoz »

McKayDavis wrote: post #42
elliotec wrote: post #18

The 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…

East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?). The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995. After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, p…

Some Utah school districts still use the k12.ut.us domain in places, for school and grade management: https://skystu.jordan.k12.ut.us/

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#47

Post by herewulf »

ozarker wrote: post #20

Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing in One Weekend series is brilliant

Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis on treating software development as an engineering discipline. It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really, but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly influenced my programming philosophy ever since.

The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently good at theory and bad in practice.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#49

Post by riceart »

elliotec wrote: post #18

The 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…

1994 was way way after dialup Internet access was mainstream (both Yahoo and Amazon were founded that year). Any first access in the state would be sometime in the 80s. By 1993 there were already national level dialup ISPs.

> that was about as long [15 minutes] as it took to load one webpage with one image.

Very hyperbolic. A simple webpage with text would load in seconds on a 28.8k modem. A single image would usually be a 10s of kB in those days, so maybe some seconds, not even a minute.

Re: The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

#50

Post by cubefox »

westurner wrote: post #4
m463 wrote: post #2

That'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

Computer graphics > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History History of computer animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation

Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny

Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

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