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Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3 tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. I

Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3 tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. It blew my mind. My computer had 128mb and an ATI Rage 128 Pro. I was young and dumb and never would have guessed I'd own a computer with 32gb of RAM that felt pitifully underpowered for today's tasks.

nottorp 7mo ago
Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI. But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.
- steve_adams_86 7mo ago
  You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and complex geometry better. I was constantly constrained by my computers back then. Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.
  - nottorp 7mo ago
    > I wonder why he showed it off. Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product back then, not an Autodesk product yet.
    - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
      Ha, you nailed it. That's exactly what it was. Thanks for jogging my memory. Back then Maya seemed like this unobtainable, magical machine for producing impossible imagery. When I finally got my hands on it, I was so disappointed to realize I still needed skills to make it do the cool things. I was ~16 and pretty clueless. I just knew Maya was used for the crazy stuff I was seeing in cut scenes from games or special effects in movies.
      - nottorp 7mo ago
        Took me until i was 20 and some change to give up. I was much faster in 3ds max than my artist friend. But I was modeling cubes and he was ... actually modeling fantastic creatures and landscapes. So I stuck to programming and other text based activities and he's usually 'visual FX lead' in the gaming industry :)

nottorp 7mo ago

Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI. But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.

steve_adams_86 7mo ago
You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and complex geometry better. I was constantly constrained by my computers back then. Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.
- nottorp 7mo ago
  > I wonder why he showed it off. Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product back then, not an Autodesk product yet.
  - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
    Ha, you nailed it. That's exactly what it was. Thanks for jogging my memory. Back then Maya seemed like this unobtainable, magical machine for producing impossible imagery. When I finally got my hands on it, I was so disappointed to realize I still needed skills to make it do the cool things. I was ~16 and pretty clueless. I just knew Maya was used for the crazy stuff I was seeing in cut scenes from games or special effects in movies.
    - nottorp 7mo ago
      Took me until i was 20 and some change to give up. I was much faster in 3ds max than my artist friend. But I was modeling cubes and he was ... actually modeling fantastic creatures and landscapes. So I stuck to programming and other text based activities and he's usually 'visual FX lead' in the gaming industry :)