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Flashback scene begins. When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used
by harel 8y ago
Flashback scene begins.
When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In another pretty big room they had a lot of amiga computers used to make the 3d models.
I then had a go at the simulator. 180 degree screen, a real cockpit, and pretty amazing 3d graphics.for the time. Flew my jet through a mountain tunnel.
I think the only thing that impressed me as much as the simulator itself was the sgi. I've never experienced that kind of futuristic computing power.
Flashback scene ends...
- sureaboutthis 8y agoI was the systems engineer for SGI mainly to McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis in 1992 for their flight simulators. If you think what you saw was something ...
- harel 8y agoI'm sure my early teen eyes saw only a glimpse. The one I was shown was designed for the Israeli air force. This was the closest I got to sit in an F-16 cockpit, and the closest I got to super computing power even films couldn't show me at the time. I do however remember them totting the 250K price tag.
- mveety 8y agoI remember seeing Boeing's simulator at their factory in the early 2000's that was powered by a room filled with SGI machines running the graphics, controlling the hydraulics, and lying to the avionics. It totally blew me away.
- sigvirt 8y agoAlso around 1993, Onyx with RE II was used by Nameco and a company called Magic Edge to build actuated flight sim pods [1]. Coincidentally also in 1993, NASA published a guide [2] to their Vertical Motion Simulator [3]. At the time, the VMS used several SGI IRIS machines as auxiliary display processors, but custom machines for primary. [1] http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=832 http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=832 - Nameco Magic Edge Simulator Ha rdware at System-16, The Arcade Museum [2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19940008535.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199400... - Vert ical Motion Simulator Familiarization Guide (pdf) (1993) [3] https://www.aviationsystemsdivision.arc.nasa.gov/facilities/vms/index.shtml https://www.aviationsystemsdivision.arc.nasa.gov/facilities/... - NASA Vertical Motion Simulator One day, the din of the machinery paled and withered under a thunderous earth-shaking draconian roar - whiplashing my head out of the rack toward the windows - an F/A-18 tilted sideways at the edge of ground effect ripping a minimum radius turn back to from whence it came ... without ever leaving the airfield. Sigh. There is no simulator for That.