[HN Gopher] The computer graphics industry got started at the un...
___________________________________________________________________
The computer graphics industry got started at the university of
Utah
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 260 points
Date : 2023-06-09 21:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| [deleted]
| trailbits wrote:
| I loved to go to the Hansen planetarium in Salt Lake City as a
| kid to learn about the night sky. I remember when they swapped
| out the star projector with the first digital projector made by
| Evans & Sutherland in the early '80s. The stars weren't as sharp
| as the old system, but getting to virtually travel to other stars
| in our galaxy and see the constellations change shape from those
| new vantage points was a real trip.
| [deleted]
| Keverw wrote:
| The U also has one of the top video game development programs
| too. I decided to go back to college in my late 20s and doing
| that program now. It used to be part of the film school, then
| they moved it to the college of engineering but I heard from a
| progress or in July they are suppose to expand to being their own
| school at the U, because there's a lot of overlap with
| programming, art and business (they use the term "Producer" for
| project managers). But apparently the program is growing and they
| want to offer more classes covering the entire spectrum but the
| people in charge of whatever college they have been apart of have
| been limiting what they could offer, or so I'm told from a
| professors Rant.
| rurban wrote:
| I would say SGI, with the invention of GPU's and OpenGL. It took
| off from there, not Evans & Sutherland before.
| benatkin wrote:
| The headline suggests one thing, the article shows another:
|
| > In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its
| computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US
| $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer
| graphics could play a role in the country's technological
| competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer
| Animation.
|
| While it's impressive that this could happen in Utah, it seems to
| have depended on a timely grant from a federal agency.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| excerpt from "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC..."
|
| "Some fields of study owed their existence to his [Bob Taylor]
| largesse. Among them was computer graphics, which came to life
| at the University of Utah when Dave Evans, a devout Mormon who
| had led the Genie team building the time-sharing SDS 940 at UC
| Berkeley, called Taylor to say his alma mater had invited him
| to return to Salt Lake to start a computer program. How about
| an ARPA project, he asked, to get it going?"
|
| "...If Evans was willing to start such a program in the
| backwater of Utah, where it could develop in pristine isolation
| from the traditionalist thinking elsewhere, Taylor was all for
| it. The venture turned out better than anyone could have
| expected. The program Taylor funded partially as a personal
| experiment and partially as a favor to an old friend evolved
| into a world leader in computer graphics research."
| benatkin wrote:
| Interesting and it makes sense that a backwater would be
| helpful, giving it a similar vibe to Skunk Works. Not too
| much though. I think most parts of Utah would be unsuitable,
| but University of Utah is pretty good. It is right up on the
| edge of the mountain range, and in the biggest city of Utah.
| foobiekr wrote:
| During my internship, I worked at Evans and Sutherland, which was
| just off of the University of Utah tech park and was a major part
| of the UoU graphics world. I worked on what I think was the last
| generation of E&S image generators. It was pretty cool,
| especially the realtime phong shading (this was the 1990s!) and
| calligraphic lighting (sort of like a vector display that
| overdrew the normal displays and made things like point lights
| look incredible!) in the actual flight simulators.
|
| The company was visibly dying at the time and I didn't take their
| offer to join, I just had other plans, but the engineers were
| incredibly welcoming. One of the people I worked with went on to
| be an imagineer. I with I had not lost touch with them, the guy I
| reported to was a great guy.
|
| It was just an amazing place, but the writing was on the wall.
| GPUs were just starting and I looked at the rack full of gear
| that was the image generator and thought: yeah, this is all going
| away soon. That was, in fact, exactly what happened.
| jasomill wrote:
| Speaking of E&S vector displays: as a young volunteer at our
| local children's museum[1] in the early '90s, I spent many
| pleasant hours screwing around with a first-generation Digistar
| planetarium system, which was essentially a vector projection
| display with an enormous dome-shaped screen driven by scripts
| running on a MicroVAX in the back room that could be interacted
| with via a variety of controllers -- joysticks, faders, etc. --
| on the planetarium floor.
|
| Sadly, this interactivity was never used in an official
| capacity while I was there; all public shows were fully
| automated affairs. But this didn't stop twelve-year-old me from
| simulating starship combat in between shows and after hours!
|
| Computer-wise, this was one of the highlights of my childhood.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...
| westurner wrote:
| > _Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern
| animation_
|
| Pixar!
|
| Pixar in a Box curriculum:
| https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar
|
| AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model:
| https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... :
| BlenderGPT, Blender-GPT,
| westurner wrote:
| Pixar > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar :
|
| > [...] _Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs 's first jobs was
| under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company
| Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to
| focus on PTT.[22] PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be
| acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.[23]_
|
| PTT: Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres
|
| Pizza Planet! (Toy Story (1995))
|
| Adobe Inc. > History:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I always wondered how different computer graphics would be if Bui
| Tuong Phong hadn't died at such a young age. It's crazy how much
| of an impact.
| dahart wrote:
| Recently Utah had a small commemorative conference where the
| photo in the picture was taken. Ivan Sutherland attended, and
| gave what I thought was the best talk, about nothing to do with
| graphics. He's actively doing research on Single Quantum Flux
| circuits at 85 years old! [1] He's trying to spread the word that
| the US is about to miss out on the next hardware revolution
| because we're not paying attention to SQF. [2] The talk is
| awesome and worth watching. Anyway, I feel like this was a sneak
| peek into one of the biggest reasons why that early graphics team
| was so successful, Ivan's amazing. Combined with some other magic
| ingredients, their environment was special, and I think, sadly,
| unreproducible.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share (For
| Ivan's talk, scroll to 5:50:00 - that's 5 hours and fifty minutes
| in.)
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-
| sutherlan...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| One of the sources of researchers for Xerox PARC, mentioned in
| "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer
| Age"
|
| - Bob Taylor -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... -
| while at ARPA, Taylor issued a US$5M grant to the University of
| Utah/Dale Evans to setup the doctoral program
|
| - Alan Kay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
|
| - John Warnock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock
|
| - also mentioned in the book from UofUtah, Bob Flegal and Jim
| Curry, who worked on Superpaint - see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint
| b33j0r wrote:
| Alumnus. We had multiple times when one of Nolan's friends came
| to class and pretty much literally dumped a bunch of Atari
| hardware on the front table.
|
| We got to play with stuff and hear some great stories. The U of
| Utah is a great place, if you like snow, physics, computers and
| steep inclines. And haha it even has a surprising cultural scene
| (there is beer.)
|
| One of my mentors there invented that magnetic ink on checks.
| That was a mind-blower too!
| nologic01 wrote:
| Computer graphics has always been a world apart in computing.
| Even today we still have the somewhat arcane world of GPU's
| versus the CPU's for the common folk.
|
| Programming-wise too, computer graphics, especially 3D, has this
| pronounced mathematical / geometric aspect to it that is not
| shared with normal applications. That has been inhereted in the
| game industry but remains a thing apart.
|
| In some sense it is only now, half a century later, with the
| increased emphasis on data science and ML/AI that this
| fundamental cleavage is being repaired:
|
| Both at the hardware side, the repurposing and utilization of GPU
| architectures for non-graphical compute and on the software side,
| the elevation of more mathematical objects like tensors (= nd-
| arrays) into first class citizens.
|
| Some of that disjointness might have been unavoidable, but maybe
| these guys (remarkably 100% male btw) in the family photo had
| something to do with it.
|
| The counterfactual would have been something like graphics
| enabled CPU's and more mainstream support in programming
| languages for the associated mathematical operations.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've been writing 3D graphics software since '84, and a few
| years ago when I started formally learning machine learning I
| found it had so many parallels with 3D graphics, the transition
| was quite a bit easier than I expected.
| data-cat wrote:
| University of Utah also has some really excellent free lectures
| on YouTube. I highly recommend Cem Yuksel's (a professor at
| university of Utah) channel if you're interested in learning
| about computer graphics.
| elliotec wrote:
| The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the
| predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-
| scholarship/arpanet/
|
| On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all.
|
| My father came from England very young, worked his way through
| agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a
| job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom
| there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For
| some reason this job required him early access to the ,,internet"
| in the 80s.
|
| In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first
| families to "have internet" in Utah. We had a dial up connection
| that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my
| age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one
| webpage with one image.
|
| It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in
| countless ways and I'm eternally grateful for what came of it.
| jb1991 wrote:
| 1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high
| school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families
| with internet in their house by 1992.
| ngngngng wrote:
| There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz
| and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs
| Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet.
|
| Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the
| first places on the planet to have the "Internet".
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The Jazz, like Jim Clark, were another transplant from New
| Orleans.
| CynAq wrote:
| I can only imagine how cool it must be to be raised by early
| adopters of internet technology.
|
| I can somewhat relate to this story in a couple coincidental
| points. First is that my father being a relatively early
| adopter of the PC in his professional life as a civil engineer
| in the early 80s, while an internet connection was about twenty
| years in the future for him, and the second one is that I
| learned electron microscopy on a Jeol microscope from 1994 when
| I was doing my master's in material science.
|
| And this is my first comment in HN. I hope everyone is doing
| wonderfully well.
| riceart wrote:
| 1994 was way way after dialup Internet access was mainstream
| (both Yahoo and Amazon were founded that year). Any first
| access in the state would be sometime in the 80s. By 1993 there
| were already national level dialup ISPs.
|
| > that was about as long [15 minutes] as it took to load one
| webpage with one image.
|
| Very hyperbolic. A simple webpage with text would load in
| seconds on a 28.8k modem. A single image would usually be a 10s
| of kB in those days, so maybe some seconds, not even a minute.
| bluedino wrote:
| I would say dial up Internet was far from mainstream in 94,
| even with was widely available.
|
| I'd argue it wasn't until 96/97 when "everyone" started using
| it and membership didn't quite peak with services like AOL
| until 2001.
|
| The internet was still the land of the nerds until the early
| 2000's
| icedchai wrote:
| It's difficult to generalize. It definitely depends on your
| location, and especially population density. Before 1995,
| it was mostly nerds and early adopters. By 1995, in the
| north east US, dial up internet had definitely gone
| mainstream. Local ISPs had ads on the radio. A new one was
| popping up everyone couple of months. By late 1997, early
| '98, broadband services (@Home cable modems, DSL) were
| starting to roll out.
|
| The Netscape IPO, in summer 1995, and also the release of
| Windows 95, really marks the "mainstream" period. Getting
| online with Trumpet Winsock and Windows 3.1 was a PITA.
| riceart wrote:
| > The internet was still the land of the nerds until the
| early 2000's
|
| The first dot com boom, sort of the genesis of fortunes
| that make this site exist was prior to the early 2000s.
|
| The early 2000s was the bust period.
| nine_k wrote:
| You assume 28.8, good phone lines, and a responsive server.
| Sometimes it was an old 9600 because it was all you could
| easily get, noisy lines, and the server on the other end
| being slow because the picture was popular. Then a page could
| load for a minute, with pictures and all.
|
| Not 15 minutes though.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Right, unless the backhaul was massively overcommitted...
| which was normal at the time because it was really difficult
| to sufficiently provision backhaul, even a few months in
| advance. The internet was certainly not fast in 1994.
|
| Anyway, since when does the truth need to get in the way of a
| good story?
| dgacmu wrote:
| This is not correct for access open to the general public.
| The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was founded in
| 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access through the
| University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown, the founder,
| had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had quite good
| internet connectivity). But most people did not if they
| weren't associated with a university.
|
| (I helped create the third public ISP in Utah (ArosNet), in
| 1995).
|
| V34 (28.8k) was only ratified in 1994, and many ISPs were
| still at 14.4 at that time. Many customers still used much
| slower modems - 9600 remained quite common.
|
| The commercial Internet really only started taking off in
| 1993. Not by coincidence, that was the same year NCSA Mosaic
| was released.
| riceart wrote:
| > This is not correct for access open to the general
| public. The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was
| founded in 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access
| through the University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown,
| the founder, had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had
| quite good internet connectivity).
|
| > The commercial Internet really only started taking off in
| 1993.
|
| 1993 is before 1994.
|
| I am very much scratching my head by how this contradicts
| anything I stated in a way that makes it not correct.
|
| If a commercial ISP existed in 1993, then by 1994 plenty of
| regular people would have been getting internet access -
| without any special affiliation other than a credit card -
| ie mainstream. (Per your own comment "many had internet
| access before that") - those affiliated were among the
| first to have internet access is a pretty reasonable
| interpretation and that was well before 1994 in all of the
| continental US.
| dgacmu wrote:
| It wasn't "way after" in Utah. Xmission turned on in
| October 1993. They grew a lot in 1994 but most people in
| the valley still did not have internet access yet. By
| 1996 the situation was very different - but 94 was still
| early in the Utah Internet days. The growth in Internet
| adoption was so rapid during those 3 years that the
| difference just between 94 and 95 was quite large.
|
| And yes, many faculty, students, and staff at the U had
| access. But that was like 50,000 people in a metro area
| of a few million.
| riceart wrote:
| Ok not "way" after - really splitting hairs here. Point
| still stands public commercial dialup internet was
| available pretty much everywhere. Call them early
| adopters or whatever - but the internet already had
| established communities well before 1994.
|
| > 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.
|
| We'll just have to agree to disagree on the
| interpretation of what "first families". In the context I
| read that post it sounded like someone saying they were
| among literally the first few, not 50k to 100k when
| anyone with a credit card could order service. First
| families in my interpretation would be those that
| probably had access from their parent's university shell
| account. This follows with the claim 15 minutes to load a
| single webpage - but unless you were on a shitty rural
| phone line running 2400bps it's not like everyone's
| dialup internet access at the time was that limited. Some
| had to put up with that but the tech in 1994 was not that
| primitive.
| dgacmu wrote:
| 50k had access if they wanted it. Most didn't use it. I'm
| confused why you don't believe me that internet
| penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in
| 1994 - I was there, I ran an internet service provider,
| and prior to that, I co-ran the largest multi-line BBS in
| salt lake. I'd been doing dial up for a long time.
|
| You may be assuming that your experience in a different
| location applies to Utah, but I think that you're really
| just shifted by a year. The GP almost certainly weren't
| actually one of the first families in the sense of
| dozens, but they could well have been first among people
| they knew in their area. 15 minutes is probably
| hyperbole.
| riceart wrote:
| > I'm confused why you don't believe me that internet
| penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in
| 1994
|
| I do believe you. Really have no dispute with any details
| you're putting down.
|
| I suppose the distinction I'm making is about the cohort
| of early adopters that had special (usually U access)
| from those using commercial ISPs or BBSes. That earliest
| cohort no matter how small it was a good bit earlier than
| 1994 and eternal September. I'll grant my wording
| inadvertently exaggerating the penetration of
| availability in 1994, just saying the first households
| were probably getting dialup some years prior.
|
| For me an EE prof managed get me a shell account in 1990
| while in middle school. Even in rust belt US many friends
| just used AOL into 1994 and uptake of dialup ISPs was
| still slow, but that 1994 cohort was distinct.
| js2 wrote:
| My first dialup was to BBS's in the early 80s using a
| Novation AppleCat[1] and I think I was using The
| Source[2] around the same time, which eventually got
| swallowed by CompuServe[3]. To access The Source you
| dialed in to Telenet[4] first and then connected from
| there.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-
| CAT_II
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
|
| 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet
|
| I think my first Internet access was through Prodigy[5].
| The Wikipedia says this wouldn't have been till 1994[6],
| but I remember it being a few years earlier since by 1994
| I would have been using AOL.
|
| 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
|
| 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
| #Conve...
|
| My first significant Internet access was at U.F. in 1995.
| While at U.F. I was also the sole system administrator
| for a small ISP in Gainesville. Two PCs running
| Slackware, a Livingston PortMaster with a dozen Hayes
| modems attached and a T1 for uplink.
|
| My family also piloted something called Viewtron in the
| early 80s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewtron
|
| AT&T marketing video for Viewtron:
|
| https://youtu.be/sgYkpk9nJnE
| photonerd wrote:
| Wow, Utah really lagged on getting an ISP, huh?
|
| From a UK perspective: my family got dual up in '94, there
| were _lots_ of ISP options & it was basically impossible
| to buy anything slower than 28.8k new (at retail anyhow,
| I'm sure you could special order) as no-where stocked them.
| 28.8 took over _fast_.
|
| I think the UK had lots pf ISPs at the time because without
| a local number to call it was VERY expensive rather than
| just _kinda_ expensive. But that's just a guess.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Population density helps a lot with internet access.
| Distance to COs is smaller, easier to wire, shorter
| backhaul, etc. The salt lake city metro area had
| reasonable density but, particularly 30 years ago, it
| wasn't like .. most places in the UK or Europe.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Commercial ISP. People had dialup internet access before
| there were commercial ISPs.
| photonerd wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware. That's what I was talking about
| jacquesm wrote:
| I was still fighting local telcos in Canada in 2003 to get
| filters removed so I could go above 9600 baud.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Dialup services were available. Most had little to no
| internet connectivity. The few services dedicated to internet
| access were not mainstream yet. MS was preparing to deploy
| MSN 1.0 with no internet because that was just a hippie fad.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Are you saying that you were made during one of those 15-min
| waits?
| herewulf wrote:
| The U of U still has a large block of public IPs that they use
| for all their "internal" systems. No need for NAT there!
|
| That was at least 100% true as of around 15 years ago. I know
| the CS and engineering departments are still using that block.
| Hard to imagine that it still holds true for WiFi APs, etc and
| the proliferation of devices.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's how the internet should have been.
| McKayDavis wrote:
| East High School is the closest public high school to the
| University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was
| fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992
| (93?).
|
| The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was
| standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.
|
| After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room
| would be full of students exploring the new online world:
| surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on
| the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.
|
| Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to
| the Internet from home. It was glorious.
| esafak wrote:
| A high school with a T1 connection was pretty sick! I don't
| know quite how to translate it into terms younger readers can
| appreciate.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Skyline High School had a teletype terminal by 1978. I
| _think_ it connected to the University of Utah, though I am
| not absolutely certain. But that was a _long_ way below a T1
| line...
| Banditoz wrote:
| Some Utah school districts still use the k12.ut.us domain in
| places, for school and grade management:
| https://skystu.jordan.k12.ut.us/
| Olumde wrote:
| > Details are .. not retrievable from the dead
|
| You inherited your dad's British humour :)
| derethanhausen wrote:
| Let's go Utes!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ozarker wrote:
| Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing
| in One Weekend series is brilliant
| dahart wrote:
| Pete came to Utah after a bit of a relative graphics drought in
| the department, right when I was trying to absorb as much as I
| could. I literally glommed onto him, learned as much as I could
| about ray tracing, started working on his path tracer, and I
| can honestly say working with Pete changed my life. That's a
| long story, but incidentally he named his path tracer "Eon"
| after how long it took to produce a decent image. He'd also
| arrived with a codebase that predated modern C++, we often used
| prefixes in class and variable names. His prefix was 'gg' which
| I don't remember what it stands for, but the prefix was so
| common he broke the 'g' key off of his keyboard.
| herewulf wrote:
| Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete
| Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great
| personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis
| on treating software development as an engineering discipline.
| It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really,
| but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly
| influenced my programming philosophy ever since.
|
| The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the
| College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've
| worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is
| clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it
| prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently
| good at theory and bad in practice.
| samstave wrote:
| Heh! One of my first big computer purchases was for an Evans &
| Sutherland card, as it was one of the only cards available that
| would run on NT, supported OpenGL and had a whopping 32 MB of
| vram... and it was full AT length board fitting nicely into a
| $1,600 price tag! (crappy drivers, IIRC)
| jamestimmins wrote:
| If you haven't read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull of Pixar, he
| (and his ghostwriter) do a great job talking about his work on
| early animation tech at Utah. Highly recommend.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Another great book that covers the early days of computer
| graphics work is Droidmaker [1]
|
| For a book that is purportedly about George Lucas and his
| contributions, it's goes into a great amount of detail about
| the histories of the computer graphics pioneers were doing
| before they worked for Lucas.
|
| I didn't realize the group was so small, and so influential.
| Highly recommended.
|
| [1] https://www.droidmaker.com/
| anderspitman wrote:
| Biography of the Pixel looks really good as well (by the other
| founder, Alvy Ray Smith). Been on my list for a while
| sohkamyung wrote:
| I've read "The Biography of the Pixel" book. It's an amazing
| and educational book about the history of computer graphics
| and the definition of a pixel by Smith.
| nla wrote:
| yes for sure!
| prpl wrote:
| I attended the High School Computing Institute in the summer of
| 2002 in the CS department (before attending and majoring in
| physics). I did more graphics with alpha_1 although there was a
| simulated cassini rover in lisp program there. It was a bunch of
| fun. I graduated from there but switched to physics because it
| was easier than EE, and I didn't think I wanted to do CS.
|
| Christopher Johnson did some of the graphics program, which was
| most memorable.
| DigiDigiorno wrote:
| _The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1
| and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit.
| They then built the E &S Picture System--the next generation of
| LDS displays._
|
| I'm working with my limited and stereotyped knowledge of Utah,
| but is "line-drawing system" a easter egg reference to latter day
| saints?
| boulos wrote:
| Yes. Somewhat famously, Sutherland named it that to troll
| Evans, to see if he'd flinch. He didn't and thought it was
| funny.
| m463 wrote:
| That's why you see this at the computer history museum:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
|
| sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy
| westurner wrote:
| Computer graphics > History:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History
|
| History of computer animation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation
| cubefox wrote:
| Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny
|
| Or, more distantly related, the test photo _Lena_ , which
| recently fell victim to political correctness:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > which recently fell victim to political correctness
|
| It amazes me how much this stuff rhymes with Christian
| fundamentalism, almost like they're slowly reinventing it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I don't really get what happened there. They found
| out 20 years later than it was a cropped image from
| Playboy, and eventually both Playboy and the model were
| fine with it being used for research purposes. Then another
| 20 years later people re-discovered this and now it was
| sexist?
|
| Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree
| that it was probably well past time to update a reference
| image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-
| technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not
| baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.
| cubefox wrote:
| [flagged]
| westurner wrote:
| (All humans have those. New York already fought for their
| legal right to public anatomy, too.)
|
| Are there higher resolution test images for ML? Maybe
| something inanimate that can't be judged and thus can't
| go to heavem anyway.
|
| sklearn.datasets.load_iris, load_digits, :
| https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html
|
| Sklearn.datasets sample images has an image of a flower
| but not a USA!: https://scikit-
| learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datas...
|
| The W3C RDF Primer could describe Shape rdfs:Class'es
| instead of People and their contact information
| rdfs:Property(s). An Object-Oriented Programming and
| Linked Data exercise: Arrange these Classes into a
| hierarchy, according to their features: Shape, Square,
| Rectangle, Triangle, Quadrilateral, Triangle.
| dahart wrote:
| FWIW, this isn't an accurate summary of what happened
| with the Lena image at all, and the story and reasons
| behind it's decline are easily available online. If you
| want to understand it, maybe it's worth looking up?
|
| Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using
| her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy
| has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is
| discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity,
| and respect in research. The journal Nature says "the
| Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote
| women undertaking higher education in science and
| engineering". [1] The paper "On alternatives to Lenna
| says " Whatever its merits, the Lenna image's origin is
| incompatible with our community's sincere attempts to
| encourage diversity and respect in Science and
| Technology". [2] (And references " A centerfold does not
| belong in the classroom". [3])
|
| It's more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work-
| most people understand why that's a bad idea, regardless
| of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if
| female teachers put up Chippendale's posters in the
| classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued
| that anyone who complained was just being PC police and
| unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might
| not care doesn't mean everyone is okay with it, and even
| if you don't care about it, it's still clearly
| unprofessional.
|
| I'm sure it's completely unintentional and that you and
| parent comment don't mean to sound unsupportive of our
| social advances of women. I'm sure like most people here
| you actively support and encourage women to learn and
| work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please
| consider more carefully the message that pushing back on
| the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you
| from other people's point of view.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2
|
| [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340
| .2016.1...
|
| [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-
| centerfold...
| cubefox wrote:
| I reject your accusations. Claiming without evidence that
| the Lena image is harmful is about as absurd as claiming
| the face of the statue of David is harmful. That's
| another often used picture, and of course completely
| ignored by the breathless "sexism!" yellers.
| dahart wrote:
| David wasn't made with the intent to be pornographic.
| Lena's picture was. Being unaware of the evidence doesn't
| mean there isn't any. There's plenty of evidence of the
| mild bias inherent in the use of Lena, if you actually
| want to find the evidence. Lots of women have mentioned
| their mild discomfort with seeing it in a professional
| setting. There's a documentary about this story called
| "Losing Lena".
| cubefox wrote:
| When someone experiences "mild discomfort" when seeing
| David (it does display an _idealized_ nude man, which
| could also be said about the Lena photo, which is far too
| artistic to be merely called "pornography") then this is
| still no reason to banish the David photo. If everything
| gets banned that someone could potentially be mildly
| offended by, then we would have to ban a hell of a lot of
| images in research and academia. Another commenter made a
| comparison to Christian puritanism. A devout Christian
| might be offended both by Lena and by David. Or think of
| a devout Muslim woman being deeply offended by the sight
| of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
| dahart wrote:
| You're comparing Playboy to da Vinci and Michelangelo...
| if you refuse to see the difference between soft-core
| porn made with the _intent_ to be sexual and titillating,
| and art made without any such sexualized intent, then
| we're having an unproductive conversation. BTW I'm with
| you against silly bans, I'm a proponent of free speech.
| In this case nobody banned anything, the movement is
| nothing more than a request by a broad group of people
| who care about cultural bias and understand how hard it
| is to undo, to stop using a specific pinup image for
| research because of what it symbolizes (porn and
| antiquated /misogynistic social attitudes), and people
| are completely free to ignore that request and keep using
| Lena if they want. You can keep trying to relitigate this
| issue if you want, but the ship sailed a while ago, this
| is just history now, and I was just trying to explain
| what happened since your comment somewhat, and
| @johnnyanmac's comment both made it clear you guys were
| unaware of the full story.
| westurner wrote:
| A nonsecular humanist could take issue with religious
| imagery, whether the model was fairly paid, and the
| articles. All NN (Non-Nude) references are suspect.
|
| "A Utah school district has removed the Bible from some
| schools' shelves" (2023)
| https://www.npr.org/2023/06/02/1179906120/utah-bible-
| book-ch...
|
| Persons from Utah, are even there good examples of
| healthy very-heteronormative marriages in the
| aforementioned now unmentionable text?
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale's posters
| in the classroom
|
| Isn't it more like if female _researchers_ used the
| cropped head-only photo of a Chippendale's guy in an
| image processing paper?
|
| Shifting it to an "interfacing with an authority figure
| for children" role is not really fair IMO, as I think
| that is why most would find it distasteful.
| dahart wrote:
| The situation isn't being shifted to interfacing with an
| authority figure for children. That's what it already
| was! Maybe not primarily, but don't miss the very point
| that research is setting an example and it percolates
| widely outside of college journals into textbooks, onto
| the internet, into videos, into work, and into homes. The
| movement is centered on the simple idea that we need to
| take the fact that we're setting examples for young women
| and young men alike slightly more seriously.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the reason why people are against the
| image being used is that <insert field here> (image
| processing in this case) used to be a male dominated
| field, and the use of an arguably contextually
| misogynistic image could make female researchers in the
| field uncomfortable and/or less included, etc. I really
| don't think setting an example for children has anything
| to do with it.
| George83728 wrote:
| > _The situation isn't being shifted_
|
| Really? Then what male researchers were hanging posters
| of Lena in classrooms?
| dahart wrote:
| What do you mean? Lena is one of the single most-used
| images in computer vision, it's been on literally
| hundreds of posters, in papers, textbooks, conferences,
| online. The Wikipedia article talks about it being used
| in college and high school classrooms.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
| cubefox wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was to 99% used in research papers.
| civilitty wrote:
| Further immortalized through the 418 I'm a Teapot HTTP error
| code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
| monocasa wrote:
| AFAIK, the 418 status is more a reference to coffee making
| than to the Utah Teapot.
| eesmith wrote:
| Yes. It's an error code for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot
| Control Protocol (RFC 2324)[1] and the author[2] has no
| Utah nor particular graphics background.
|
| [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 , https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter
| karmakaze wrote:
| I was totally expecting to see the teapot on the page.
|
| The photo does have Martin Newell in it who created the famous
| model.
| mrandish wrote:
| Basically the entire foundation of computer graphics is within a
| couple degrees of separation of the guys in that photo.
| anderspitman wrote:
| That picture was taken at a nostalgic symposium a few months ago.
| I'm very fortunate to live nearby and was able to attend. It was
| awesome. Got to meet a couple of my heroes. They livestreamed it
| as well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0
| ggm wrote:
| First shape I 3D printed was the Utah teapot.
|
| Back in the 80s there was a fantastic spool of renders which
| occasionally featured the teapot anachronistically flying through
| landscapes and effect showcases as a little private motif.
| s1mon wrote:
| Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and
| Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed
| into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used
| by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop
| exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally
| written in Lisp.
|
| Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it
| described the relation between surfaces as a bunch of rules. So
| surfaces 'A' and 'B' could influence 'C', and then the user
| change their mind and decide that 'C' should drive 'A' and 'B'
| instead. Unlike other parametric tools which would come later,
| you didn't set this up by reordering a bunch of features, you
| just changed the connection icons between the surfaces. It was up
| to CDRS to figure out what order to solve the constraints and
| build the surfaces.
| McKayDavis wrote:
| Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in
| Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S.
|
| CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the
| University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler.
|
| After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept.
|
| I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint.
| It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to
| allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models
| instead of in texture space.
|
| So many more memories I wouldn't know where to begin...
| s1mon wrote:
| I started using ISDX in '96 soon after PTC acquired it and
| managed to port it and make it work with Pro/E. I've worked
| on a number of products which are still in production using
| it, but it's been a while since I was using Pro/E (now Creo).
| I don't miss Creo, but I do miss ISDX. There was a while when
| I was using Solidworks and Pro/E (with ISDX) depending on the
| project/client, but then I transitioned to Solidworks for
| many years. Now I'm using Onshape (started by the key people
| from Solidworks) which recently was acquired by PTC. Both
| Solidworks and Onshape use the Parasolid kernel which was
| first developed for Unigraphics. It seems like it's a small
| world in CAD tool development.
| prpl wrote:
| When was that?
|
| I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school
| at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD
| experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended
| up making a 3D Model of Escher's Belvedere. One of the guys
| was going to "print" it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB
| (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might
| be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray
| tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the
| lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We
| also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured
| their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375
| at the time.
| McKayDavis wrote:
| I don't know the exact year the CDRS group was acquired by
| PTC, but it be around the same time I attended the same
| High School Computing Institute in 1996.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Jim Clark was a native of the South (Texas) and went to night
| school at Tulane in New Orleans before he went to Utah for
| graduate school.
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