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The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

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Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#51

Post by kristopolous »

kristopolous wrote: post #48
dreamcompiler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark. When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one. There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakf…

Correction, 2023...

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#52

Post by hilbert42 »

cgsmith wrote: post #20
hilbert42 wrote: post #2

I wonder what that kid ended up doing for a profession and what he thinks of today's computers. That BBC news report is interesting as it puts about 60 years of tech/computing progress into perspective. Now extrapolate 60 years hence—right, today's mind just boggles.

I was also thinking something similar. If it was me as a child it would be quite nostalgic to see a video of myself at 4 years old with my father.

Well, I actually remember much of that time myself. About a year or so after that video was made I was learning to program in Fortran on the university's IBM-360 mainframe. (Learning to program was compulsory for anyone studying science, engineering and mathematics and the subject was a part of the math curriculum.)

So I was ready when the early processors, 8080/5, Z80 and 8086 arrived a few years later. In fact I was running both DR's CP/M and Tim Patterson's SCP DOS on an S-100 system around the time Microsoft bought the product and renamed it MSDOS.

Re: The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

#53

Post by sehansen »

kristopolous wrote: post #48
dreamcompiler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bui_Tuong_Phong

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark. When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one. There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakf…

Reminds of this Neil Gaiman anecdote about imposter syndrome:

"""Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. """

from: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-a...

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