undefined

points

[-]

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.

by nottorp5 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

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

by steve_adams_865 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

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.

by nottorp4 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> I wonder why he showed it off.

Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product back then, not an Autodesk product yet.

by steve_adams_861 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

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.