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St. wrote:
> none whatsoever.
Wow! For someone learning how to program, as well as computers, OS's,
peripherals and so on, as well as the idiosyncracies of POV SDL, as well
as the sophisticated concepts surrounding CG, you are doing extremely
well with this. Just the distinction between numeric and 'string' data
is a stumbling block for most programming beginners. I came to this as a
trained programmer somewhere around '98 and am only now gaining some
confidence. It took nearly a year before I caught on to why so much
happens as values between 0 and 1! It was an epiphanal moment ;)
Though we have some similarities. I actually first connected to the
internet six years ago for the express purpose of investigating
raytracing. And I hadn't owned a computer for much time prior to that.
I was a mainframe programmer, and a painter. My very, very first
programming job was working on games on an early personal machine called
a Commodore 64. I hated it. There was no harddrive, no virtual memory,
data were stored on external 5 1/4 floppy drives. These drives were
notoriously unreliable. It was common to loose a whole day's work
because of drive malfunction. I used to have a whole stack of drives on
my desk and each morning I would go down the stack to see which one felt
like working that day. We would steal each other's drives. I just
hated it. Loved mainframes when I finally got there! They are extremely
reliable and other people are paid to worry about the hardware. I could
concentrate on programming. Heaven! I loath dealing with hardware and in
particuar consumer electronics. I distrusted PC's in the extreme. So I
came to the whole home computer thing rather late considering my
programmer identity.
Funny, I didn't come to raytracing becuase of cg or movies or pop
culture at all. As I painter I fancied that the behavior of light was
my balliwick and when I learned that computers were being used to model
that behavior I just had to find out about it.
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