Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>
> It's always fun to see folks who were around in the early days on
> CompuServe.  :)

Ah, sadly I wasn't having any online activity at that time, sorry. :O I had a
1200 bit/s modem, but it was never used. Here in Finland it was still quite
expensive to call anywhere, thus my resort was those few (yet also costly)
import magazines with utility disks wrapped along. Those were from where I later
got a newer version of POV too in addition to those many trial versions of other
software.

A good friend of mine had the possibility to access several bulletin boards, but
those were rather quick visits for getting us some shareware games every now and
then.


Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>
> But I always held those who worked in SDL directly and could translate
> their vision (not just shapes, but textures - I am awful at textures) in
> very high regard.  Giles Tran, Shay, and so many others produced
> absolutely jaw-dropping images; for me, it was like watching an
> illusionist perform magic and not knowing (or caring) how it was done.

Indeed and same here, my highest respect to Tran, Shay, Hormann, Piqueres, Kern
and so many others for their stunningly mind-blowing works! Even though feeling
most comfortable with the SDL, I'm still far from all that. Already long time
ago I embraced my destiny and ever since been concentrating mostly on game style
art with anything else but realistic textures etc., as actual simulations of
reality in any level of accuracy is still completely beyond my head. :D


Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>
> Today I play in Blender when I need to put something together, but
> getting the POV-Ray plugin going is something that I've not fully
> completed.  I need to get back on that and re-render some of my more
> recent images with it.  It'd be interesting to see the differences in
> output compared to Cycles.

I must confess - with a slight sting in my heart - that lately I've been
fiddling around with a Finnish software called Realsoft 3D (formerly as Real
3D). It has a history going back to the Amiga times, and was too expensive for
my budget back in the day. A couple of years ago they released the version 8 and
it was just 200 EUR (~ 233 USD), so finally gave it a go. I remember this one
from the early 90s as well, so at last I can see and try myself what it is
about. The render output is surprisingly close to that of POVs btw.


=====

Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
>
> For me, I first came across raytracing in the late 80's when I
> experimented with one on am Amiga. I don't recall which one it was but
> remember that I liked the fact I could make decent-looking images by
> typing rather than painting with a mouse (I'm no artist and can barely
> draw a straight line).

I think I found the actual concept/idea of ray-tracing a couple of years earlier
than POV. I was right there blown away with this "new world of computer
graphics", and I was dreaming of one day doing all that stuff myself. Then came
POV and that's where I discovered my path to salvation. :D


Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
>
> In the early 90's I started working on a project where the product
> rolled out to the customer needed to run on a high-end workstation (and
> as such all the developers needed them too). The end result of this was
> that shortly thereafter each of us had a very sweet (for the time) 60mHz
> 64-bit DEC Alpha tower loaded with 32MB of RAM appear under our desks.
>
> Now compared to the typical PC of the day this was a monster. Most PC's
> were still running 16-bit DOS and maybe had a few MB ram at most, and
> here I was with a 64-bit footwarmer with 10x the RAM and 10x the speed
> of my home PC that was sitting idle 99.9% of the time as we hadn't yet
> written the applications they were bought for and had nothing else
> really compute-intensive to run on them.

Oh yes the DEC Alpha! It surely was my wet dream (right next to those
over-the-top Silicon Graphics workstations). :D There was this one big computer
store in Helsinki that I used to visit very often, and at some point they had an
Alpha set-up in one corner. The price tag on it was astronomical thus way out of
reach for any common mortal. It may be it was just for some presentation
purposes afterall, as like your said, the applications weren't many yet.
Regardless, I was like Homer Simpson gurgling over a donut when cautiously
touching the machine for the first time in the store. :D

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