8MB of ram was exactly our maximum limit on Cubicomp in 1988. This was on a Compaq 386(DX or DXII? can't remember) and was 2 years prior to 3DS R1.
Granted this Compaq was several times more expensive than anything available to the general public. And yes, we were still hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat even then. It was really cool to see a boot up go from 3 minutes to 2 by tweaking files and buffers. :) By 1992 Cubicomp was pretty much in the tubes and the 3DS folks were living the good life on 3DS R2. Will never forget my first exposure to 3DS R3 at Siggraph 93 in Anaheim. Max was still a couple years away. I remember attending 3DS seminars in Memphis,TN in 95 just prior to Max being released. It was really impressive for that time. I have to admit, having started my experience in this industry on the PC, and coming to SGI apps many years later, I'm old enough to remember a time when CGI on the PC was all but an elusive dream. The systems that were somewhat successful there, Cubicomp, Digital Arts, Crystal Topas, etc were never perfect and all had serious insurmountable issues. Until 3DS came along, a lot of us had given up hope that it was even possible to bridge the gap from Unix to Dos and do 3D on the PC effectively, inexpensively, and on a stable platform. On the same note, the shockwave that Amiga sent through the industry with Lightwave in the early-mid 90's can't be ignored either. But we never really viewed Lightwave as a PC app because it wasn't on DOS. Which raises an ironic point. As bad as the current state of things are today. Most people have no concept for how really bad things were back in that day when we were often working for years on frozen defunct software, made by companies who had closed their doors years prior, and with no options of any kind to replace what we had without several hundred thousand dollars at hand. I'm not saying we should be happy about the current state of software dev, but it's far more complicated than most of us realize. And I think that is the point that Didak was trying to make... -- Joey Ponthieux __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau Sent: Saturday, August 03, 2013 1:10 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Yost Group - related to the Naiad/SIGGRAPH discussion On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Angus Davidson <[email protected]> wrote: > > I always felt 3dsR4 was where it peaked . having to work with max 1 > and 2 for me wasn't a very pleasant experience. I was very grateful to > move off off that to a version of Softimage|DS > > I think the Autodesk management is underestimating how concerned their user > base has become. Max 1 and 2 must have been a pretty tough time, given that it's a new app that didn't work with any of the DOS plug-ins, and .. was written for Windows NT, which nobody wanted to use or had the hardware for. (8 megs of RAM, are you crazy?) This was a time when people were still a couple years away from giving up hacking their config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak the 640k DOS memory. Of course XSI had it owns OS choice issues and is still trailing the old SI|3D in animation performance as well. Still, being the vastly popular plug-in platform that it is, Max is the app we all wish we could have made.
