Ken Pergola (sent by Nabble.com) wrote: > If you tell me that those images were produced by Adobe's Postscript > language, I would be impressed They weren't. > Something to do with texture mapping? Z-buffer? Not really either for those. > Looking at long hallway from afar (TEMPLE). 2006 JAN 14 10:34:37 EST > Copied from file D:\apollo\quest2.img > Looking down the long hallway (ARCADE). 2006 JAN 14 10:34:27 EST > Copied from file D:\apollo\quest1.img > > Are these clues? Inadvertently, but probably only to those who already know the answer. > 1) Is the answer in your book? I don't think so. I don't remember using one of the images in the book, but then again that was a long time ago. > 2) Were the images produced by an Apollo workstation? Yes! > 3) Quest1 and Quest2: Was 'Quest' a video game? No. > 4) Was the graphics engine based on a Motorola 68xxx processor? These were all rendered in software. > 5) Is this related to IBM's release of the VGA standard? Not at all. > Well, I'm out of guesses...tag you're it! :) OK. The images are two frames from the animated movie Apollo produced for SIGGRAPH'85 called "A Long Ray's Journey into Light". The significance is that they were ray traced, which everyone at the time knew means it took hours to render each frame. This was the first time anyone had put together a movie of more than a few seconds that was entirely ray traced. Think about the enormous compute power required. It took several CPU hours to render each frame, and you needed 24 of them just to make one second of animation. If I remember right, the movie was about 45 seconds long, which was about half the time of the standing ovation it received from the SIGGRAPH audience immediately after. It may not seem like a big deal today, but it was a very big deal back then. Rendering a few ray traced frames was tough enough, but over 1000 of them!!? To put this in perspective, Al Barr got major applause at SIGGRAPH'82 when he showed about a 10 second ray traced animation of an object rotating. His object was deliberately chosen to have symmetry, so he only had to render 1/4 of the frames and just repeated them 3 more times to show the object rotating a full circle. Still everyone was quite impressed, and it took him many nights on a Prime 750 to render the images. The Apollo movie was only 3 years later. Apollo made this movie to point out the aggregate computing power of a large network of "little" machines. There were over 1000 machines on the Apollo network at the time, and special software was written so that you could allow your node to participate in the collective rendering when you weren't using it, like at night. Really only Apollo could have done this at the time. Nobody else had that kind of untapped computing power hanging around. Others, like government labs, had substantial computing power, but it was expensive and needed to be put to good use. ****************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, (978) 742-9014. #1 PIC consultant in 2004 program year. http://www.embedinc.com/products -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist