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#cg

2 posts2 participants0 posts today
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Jaycosm🔆

I stumbled upon an interesting blog today while searching for an image of the Silicon Graphics 3D cube logo. Named "Abort Retry Fail" by Bradford Morgan White, the blog's articles document computer history. I eventually wound up reading three of them.

#1 "The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics"

abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and

Abort Retry Fail · The Rise and Fall of Silicon GraphicsBy Bradford Morgan White
#AbortRetryFail#Blog#RetroComputing
Continued thread
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Brian Tatosky

We did what we needed, over delivered and made it look good, probably taught them all kinds of basics on how to get CG projects done and everyone was happy.

We never heard from them again after that project. I dunno, they probably became big CG commercial producers or something afterwards. :)

(3/3)

#VFX#CG#Windows
Continued thread
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Brian Tatosky

It quickly was determined they had *no* idea what they were talking about or doing, and further discovered they had gotten this project through a contact at Microsoft, intended on doing it themselves, but didn't know how and then came to us. And didn't want Microsoft to know it was us executing and not them

One was frat boyish and the other explained all things with sound effects and gestures. so we called them "Sparky and Sonic Boy" behind their backs.

(2/3)

#VFX#CG#Windows
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Brian Tatosky

One of the strangest CGI project I've worked on was footage that played during the installation of Windows 95 on you computer. Animating and moving Windows logo elements. I assume it played millions of times, but probably watched by no one as they walked away and waited for the OS to install.

Two "producers" approached Rhythm and Hues with the project, as if it was a very prestigious thing and asked us all kinds of questions like "what format would you make it in?"

(1/3)

#VFX#CG#Windows
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amen zwa, esq.

I began my love affair with #CG in the early 1980s, and with #GUI not much later. By the early 2000s, I had worked with X/Xt/Xaw, SunView, OpenLook, Motif, NeXTSTEP, Win32, OS/7, Carbon, Cocoa, Tk, Gtk, Qt, WxWidgets, AWT, Swing, and many others that I no longer care to recall.

Suffice it to say, I had fallen out of love with GUIs, after 20 years, mainly because of the industry's inability to standardise on what constitutes a "good" UI.

Today, more than 40 years hence, I am ever more disillusioned with this rampant, uncontrolled, cat-herding attitude of our #IT industry:

• Do we really need 10 new web UI frameworks per day?
• Are we unhappy with WPF, Cocoa, Material, ..., ..., ...?
• Does every application we implement need a "novel" UI?
• Are we really pushing the state-of-the-art, when we just tweaked a tiny bit in an existing UI framework?

We in IT, who work for "businesses", need to focus on business needs. We need to stop viewing ourselves as "artistic innovators" and "tech boundary pushers". We must focus on usability, consistency, simplicity, maintainability, and cost effectiveness for the benefit of our users and our employers.

Of course, we in tech mustn't shun innovation. But there's a place for innovation: it's called peer-reviewed academic articles. And we must recognise that forking a repo out of resentment isn't innovation.

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