I hate to bring up the old days, but here's my take on Apple in photos. Once upon a time, say 1983 or so, there were primitive computers. We had $15,000 HP9816's - PC's for serious scientific work on our desks. IBM hadn't made PC's yet. Others in the department had 2 Apple IIe's, the top of the line at the time. They used them to connect to our marketing co-workers who had some Apples. Marketing was using the Apples to talk to the 'Ad Agencies'. The agencies were/are smart folks who tend to be on the cutting edge. (Think eggheads with an impaired ethics.) They adopted Apples early.
The agency folks manage all the advertising images we see in the USA. In the early '80's, they used the Apples to send line art (newspaper coupon art) from the national lead agency out to the local agencies. Eventually, they used their Apples to organize images they were/are using to advertise products. Improved work flow, communication, distribution, yadda, yadda, yadda... And then Apple introduced the Mac's which raised the ante on the whole graphics thing. Apples became first computers used in the photo business. And Apple is a religion, not a computer system. Nobody is gonna switch. That's my story and I'm sticking with it, Bob S. On 11/29/05, John Francis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:31:24AM -0500, Bob Shell wrote: > > > > On Nov 29, 2005, at 8:29 AM, Rob Studdert wrote: > > > > >Interesting, I attend film industry technology talks (irregularly > > >granted) and > > >I'm surprised about what you are saying. > > > > > > > Yes, but I'll bet you aren't going to California for those talks! > > > > >Again interesting, I hadn't heard of Mac farms usually they tend to > > >use PC > > >servers running some form of UNIX, maybe they are now harnessing > > >the UNIX side > > >of the Macs now that the OS has grown up? > > > > Could be. I don't know the folks who built this system, just read > > the numerous articles about it while it was being built and tested. > > The current Mac OS is certainly exceptionally stable. > > I used to work for SGI during the transitional period from dedicated > high-end rendering systems to clusters of low-end computers. Most of > the render farms I know of are Linux servers using commodity hardware > (Intel or AMD processors, PCI I/O, Ethernet), although at least one > major studio switched to Windows boxes (look for HP in the credits). > > The graphics art department (character design, textures, etc.) quite > often used Macs, but all the animation, modelling, etc. was done with > complex packages - either proprietary or third party. These were, in > general, initially available on Unix (Solaris, IRIX, etc.), and were > ported to Linux very early on. Many of the third-party packages, and > even some of the in-house proprietary systems, were also ported to > Windows; porting a Posix-compliant application isn't very difficult. > > Some research groups at Universities did put together Mac-based > rendering systems, especially once the cost per compute cycle on a > Mac became more or less competitive with the Intel processors. But > as far as I know (and I still have a few friends in the industry, > including at least one of those sys admins mentioned in the credits) > renmdering continues to be done mostly on Intel/Linux render farms, > either in-house or, increasingly, using rented time on systems at > manufacturers. > > >
