61–70 of 146 posts
Just five years later, the 3dfx voodoo2 did most of what that machine did (without the accumulation buffer).
I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside. I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a…
Like, can you arrange, say, ten flagship graphic cards for realtime rendering? Do we have game engines that can scale to that number?
The VRML demo at 18 minutes in really took me back: https://youtu.be/Bo3lUw9GUJA?t=18m I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail? Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the vis…
It was exactly that.
I participated on one SGI demo around 1995. It included tehnology demo and the grand vision from some guy I don't remember.
They had few the these bad boys (bigger refrigerator sized models) and very fast internet running Netscape browser. They wanted us to start to develope for this to this new thing called Java that would allow code run everywhere.
They demoed what they thought internet would look like after 3-5 years:
* 3d browsers with VRML. HTML is replaced with 3d virtual rooms with 3d surround audio.
* you can attach pieces of Java code to the VRML and freely interact with objects
* people would buy stuff in the internet using micropayments possibly using new fancy new digital currencies like DigiCash (this was still hand waving). There was also this thing called E-gold few years later.
* the demo included virtual kitchen design app, virtual rooms with water fountains and java controlled robots, and fish that responded to their environment.
It was all mindblowing technologically, but none of the ideas were new to me because I had been reading Snow Crash (1992) and others. Jaron Lanier and VPL Research were also known to work with these things.
In fact, it looks like we are repeatedly trying to bring the same vision alive. Every wave of attempts is getting us little bit closer but always falling short little bit.
In the current wave Nvidia has replaced Silicon Graphics and there are new technologies doing the same things in VR and AR. Now we have cryptocurrencies, javascript, Wasm, WebGL, mobile GPU's, 5G. Most of the current bleeding edge will crash when the next recession hits around 2020 or so and some of it will survive. I'm looking forward to the next generation of technology emerging around 2025 ...
I was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all. The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was l…
I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside. I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a…
In the recent 3-5 years, there is a clear revival of the cyberpunk subculture online. Many related hobbyist websites appeared, many new cyberpunk-inspired independent art, music and games are composed, new communities are formed, etc.
Themes include a general nostalgia of the 80s, especially vintage computers, also the 90s early pre-Web 1.0.
The reason? We can clearly see. The lost future that never comes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good. My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you…
I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.
I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.
Flashback scene begins. When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In an…
The VRML demo at 18 minutes in really took me back: https://youtu.be/Bo3lUw9GUJA?t=18m I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail? Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the vis…
We had a maxed out one of those in the company lab. I seem to remember that it was on the loud side. What a tremendous waste of money.