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Not For Astronauts ...


Flashermac
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  • 4 weeks later...

That is *BEAUTIFUL* CGI.

 

And no, that kind of technology was not even remotely available in 1969.

 

The cheapest home PC you can buy new today is *FAR* more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer from 1969.

 

I was there. My father was doing refresher work in 1970, during a period of unemployment, taking (among other things) beginning computer programming in FORTRAN. At that time, UT Austin had a Control Data 6600, which was the undisputed biggest, baddest supercomputer on the planet. I got started in programming on that machine, in summer of 1970, when I tagged along to one of his classes.

 

I remember when ray-tracing computer graphics STARTED, in the early 1980s. It was "supercomputers only". I remember "Tron" and "The Last Starfighter". I remember when I first started playing with POV-Ray, some time after I bought a 486/33, then found my old 6600 reference manual, and realized that my desktop PC was more powerful than the UT Austin 6600 that got me started. And I remember how POV-Ray beat that 486/33 to death.

 

Fast forward to Fall of 2003, when *I'm* doing refresher work at UT Austin, during a period of unemployment. I'm repeating the graphics class, which I'd first taken in the mid-1970s, and the last programming assignment is ray-tracing. And I'm doing it on a PC. And I'm pleasantly amazed at how SIMPLE the code was, and at the same time quite aware of how hard I was beating the CPU to death with it...

 

Dad passed away a few years ago. I don't remember whether I ever showed him the graphics homework results. I don't think I did. I do remember Mom mentioning quietly one night, after Dad had gone to bed, that he was INCREDIBLY proud of me, for going back to school during the extended unemployment period.

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My father was a top level aerospace engineer. He had graduated using the post-WWII GI Bll, in the days of vacuum tubes and when even printed circuits were unimagined. He worked on the Aerobee, Viking and all sorts of "upper air research" rockets I've forgotten the names of. He took me to watch the launch of the last Viking at White Sands PG in 1955. (My teacher didn't want to excuse me, saying it was not a a valid reason to miss his class!) After that I remember him working on the early reconnaissance drones at Fort Huachuca, and the Titan ICBM at the Pacific Coast Missile Range. He was in line for an important position and a nice pay increase on Project Dyna-soar (an early version of the Space Shuttle), but Nixon killed it. He was in an instrumentation project engineer on the Space Shuttle and ended up tech writing the book about it (without credit). He finished his working career on the Space Shuttle, and remarked that watching the Challenger blow up was enough to give you a heart attack. Two weeks later, he had one. (Thanks to bypass surgery, he lived another 20 years.)

 

Why do I say this? Because after 30+ years at the leading edge of technology, he was a bit in awe of modern computer science. He felt he had been left behind. (In fact, Lee de Forest one of his profs. Google that name, if you don't know it.) Following his retirement, dad did start teaching himself programming, but he said to me. "This almost seems unbelievable compared to what I started working with." He missed the days when an engineer designed the system, built it, and then placed it on the rocket himself. They are long gone and will never return.

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Hi,

 

POV-ray on a 486. That brings back memories :)

 

Doing raytracing the hard way, no graphical interface, all code and waiting minutes (or even hours) for even a quick test run to see if you placed an object in the right place.

 

Sanuk!

 

When I worked at a technical university in 80:s a collegue wrote a program torender the famous Utah teapot. It ran on a Sun workstation with a 68020 CPU. The rendering took about 50 minutes.

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He was in line for an important position and a nice pay increase on Project Dyna-soar (an early version of the Space Shuttle), but Nixon killed it.

Not even close, Flash.

 

My father was at Boeing, on Dyna-Soar, when SecDef Robert Strange McNamara cancelled the program. Boeing laid off a BUNCH of guys, a few days/weeks before Christmas, in 1963.

 

I don't remember if this was before or after Dallas, but I can absolutely tell you that Nixon had NOTHING to do with Dyna-Soar, or its cancellation. Nixon lost the 1960 election, and was nowhere near Washington in 1963.

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