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These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much

These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good. My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :) The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print. I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.

danieltillett 8y ago
I haven't thought about the binders in ages. There was nobody in my department who knew much about the SGI machines and my only tutor was those binders. Looking back I wonder how I accomplished anything at all.
timthorn 8y ago
I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  I worked at a remote office for SGI in 1992. I called my boss at the home office complaining I didn't have a computer to test software with. He apologized for having dropped the ball and immediately ordered a 16 processor system for me. I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.

danieltillett 8y ago

I haven't thought about the binders in ages. There was nobody in my department who knew much about the SGI machines and my only tutor was those binders. Looking back I wonder how I accomplished anything at all.

timthorn 8y ago

I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.

sureaboutthis 8y ago
I worked at a remote office for SGI in 1992. I called my boss at the home office complaining I didn't have a computer to test software with. He apologized for having dropped the ball and immediately ordered a 16 processor system for me. I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.