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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.

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 3y ago
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_Indianapolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...

jasomill 3y ago

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_Indianapolis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...