About Flight: My Indy had a weird glitch. After leaving the machine on overnight invariably in the morning I'd find it running 'Flight' with a plane crashed face down as the last thing on the screen. Complete mystery. So, one night I decided enough is enough and I need to figure this out. 2:30 am, footsteps on the staircase. Now, I don't know about you but that even if you expect it that's such a chilling sound. Next thing I know Flight is up and running. I snap on the office lights to see my five year old that had figured out my password by repeated observation blink like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He cried for a bit and I asked him 'why?' and he said he wanted to show us he can fly but he can't get past the landing part... He could fly just fine though!
SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
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Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#62It's a unix system! I know this.
That 3d file manager was called 'fsn'. Then there is a gtk/Linux port called 'fsv'. I maintain a version updated to gtk+3 at https://github.com/jabl/fsv . Unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I haven't had the time to port to gtk4 nor add some missing features.
In a just world, we would have this on every computer, instead of Candy Crush.
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#63Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
I worked with an SGI 2400T workstation and it came with a 4:3 aspect high resolution monitor (4K I think, different from today's 4K). Later workstations probably had wider screens. However even that old machine could display to a wide variety of screen sizes. I connected ours to an NTSC projector and they were often used for rendering movie computer graphics (though rendering doesn't depend on the display size). If I remember correctly the pixels were square by default, but there was a lot of control over rendering and display. NTSC at that time wasn't even a very firm standard, lots of companies implemented it differently and hi-res displays tended to be custom with no standards at all (used for air traffic control for example).
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#64Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#65Ours a SGI 4D-220 in a molecular modeling lab, these demos made everything else look sick - we had the horsepower; engineers and programmers upset they didn't; trad CS and admins mad because I admin'd them as they were DEC and IBM snobs, mocked UNIX as a toy. Also Evans and Sutherland, a NeXT machine, MicroVAX, Macs used for building a hardware pulse sequencers for 3D NMR, custom DSP for 2D NMRs, (4) million dollar superconducting NMRs and an entire lab - all the cool toys of the day, life was good.
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#66At the SIGGRAPH '96, where they launched the N64, SGI had an awesome stage show: there was an MC and a user with a VR setup on, some Onyx refrigerators behind them, and a big screen showing the VR view.
It was awesome - they were basically building New Orleans with legos: open a toolbox filing cabinet, choose a brick, run it all the way down the block, run that line of bricks up 200 feet to create the side of a building, rinse repeat.
Would love to see that one again.
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#67Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :( Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections. SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) ha…
I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.
What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#68Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
I remember the SGI workstations in our campus lab having such an absurdly curved surface.
It made other contemporary CRTs feel like flat screens by comparison.
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#69Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD... High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it. In SGI tech support (East team '96, Unix team '97 - my Indigo was dewi.csd.sgi.com), it was the way we copied files around (the Troops had just come out) and also had a internal tool that would pop up a window on someone else's machine to get their attention (if they weren't directly paying attention to the multicast chat program...)
> Ahh... the required "guest" account with no password on it.
That plus the lack of a default /etc/shadow, because reasons, made for fun times. ;-)
Re: SGI demos from long ago in the browser via WASM
#70I would like to see dogfight and Mekton.