This is such an excellent episode. The entire series of the Computer chronicles is of historical importance. I’m extremely pleased to live in a time where one can just whip out a device while on the go and watch shows like this.
they have some late 80s early 90s episodes on the early internet that are super cool. lots of good predictions (and the bad ones are fun too lol). this series really is a phenomenal historical document.
I would have been around 10 when I saw this episode on PBS... afterward of course, I would go back to my humble little c64, stare at the RF-connected 14" b&w TV screen, displaying the c64 powerup screen, and its blinking cursor... just sit there, minutes on end... daydreaming of one day, owning such a powerful machine like SG... :) Guess I'm still doing the same thing, the difference is now I'm daydreaming of an RTX4090ti :)
The Geometry Engine referred to in this clip evolved through many generations at SGI and then migrated with the SGI graphics engineering team to nVidia where they developed the monster Tesla GPU - a supercomputer in a card. In that respect the legacy of SGI still lives and dominates high-end computing.
SGI-> ArtX startup-> bought by ATi->AMD. One of them, David Wang, is now SVP of AMD corporation, responsible for engineering of Radeon Technology Group. There is also Joe Macri, who is working with graphics memory, and some who have retired already.
Man, to be able to see those 3D Polygonal graphics in real time would have blown my mind in 1984. Silicon Graphics were really ahead of the curve back then.
And to think that only 9 years later similar graphics were being produced on a $200 video game console (SNES) with games like Star Fox. It was a time of rapid, conspicuous progress.
Back in the early 80's comuter graphics were among the most exciting things anyone could think of. There were talented people that could do the most astounding things with the very limited machines of the era. You can say that of course about almost everything that the computer wizards of those days could achieve. Memory was so scarce and the machines were so slow, but still there was for example a chess program written in BASIC for the Sinclair ZX81 that fit in it's 1KB of RAM! Every byte, every bit was so precious. Today memory and processing speed are often wasted, a simple flashlight app for your smartphone can consume a Megabyte or even more...
True, but that's the value trade-off. CPU time and RAM get cheaper and cheaper while the cost of human time remains the same. The upside is that you wind up with coding becoming accessible to people without the knack for that kind of hyper-optimization... leading to, among other things, some great indie games that might otherwise never have existed.
computer graphics is an incredibly hot topic these days too with the advent of ray-tracing, path tracing and neural net integration such as DLSS and Frame Generation (Nvidia) and also the papers on neural materials and neural radiance cache (also nvidia), NERFS, among others...exciting times ahead!
I remember those days, when rendering single frame of 3d graphic on my computer was taking anywhere form few hours to few days depending on the complexity
@20:20 "How far can you go with this techhnology? Will we get to the point were we can be replaced by animated people?" And nowadays we have concerts with holographic performers on stage that have died years ago....
In 1980s, Hanna-Barbera had the Computer Animation System software for digital inking & painting in shows such as Yogi's Treasure Hunt & the 1st season of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.
Five years later we had "The Abyss", which really was the first non-cartoon big time CGI-assisted movie (Tron and the likes were more cartoonish. The abyss looked "real"). I think it was Silicon Graphics machines that was used for that one (and later Terminator 2). Amazing development in those few years!
@@SanctusBacchus Yes, and even the speed of light itself is a big limiting factor in the speed of which modern processors can run today. That's why it's all about more cores cores cores, rather than more speed. Most modern processors are a good deal slower than Processors of say mid to early 2000s, in terms of gigahertz.
@@aarongreenfield9038 More gigahertz = more heat (unless you make photonic CPUs) and smaller = faster due to light speed, which increases with integration density. But miniaturizing too much makes atoms bounce around, making chips shortlived. So the insane technology of SSD memory (which is DRAM with 1 year refresh rate) will lead to the mankind's dark streaming age of that nothing was left that future archeologists could identify (beside decomposed remains of mysterious dead small black mirrors once known as smartphones), so mankind had to start over again another times from the soon approaching next stoneage.
This SGI computer cost around 80 grand, about a quarter of a million in todays money. 6 million floating point ops per second! Owning such a computer would have been beyond my wildest dreams as a kid. Now I have a GPU that does 81 trillion floating point ops per second, that I just take for granted (4090) .. You could get a render farm that'll handle over 5000 trillion FLOPS per sec for the price of that SGI! Mind boggling
+Peter M. Ladey It's amazing that Lucas studio made a short CGI movie in 1984 already. Or 85... or 86. Don't remember =) Also "Young Sherlock Holmes" from 1985 had fully computer generated character in it. Also there was CAD software in.......... 60s already so actually computer graphics weren't something innovative
My first foray into computer art was on an Atari 130XE with Atari Touch Tablet and Atari Micro Illustrator. That was 160 x 192 pixels with 4 onscreen colours from a choice of 128 (16 hues x 8 shades). These days it's a Wacom Intuos and a 4K monitor.
00:07:43 Michael was so excited he missed a great opportunity for Sepia Tone. Excitement had a lower bar back then. (invert and mirror functions oh my!) Good Times. 00:18:36 Ann's tracing here is amazing. Woot woot!
17:30 - "...very different to individual 'pic cell' (pixel) operations..." - sounded weird, but then I realised that's how the word pixel is probably derived. A PICture CELL. Hah...
SGI were pioneers in computer graphics their workstations were so expensive but big companies like Nintendo used them to render graphics for games on SNES like Donkey Kong.
4:47 "Computer systems used to create these images aren't designed to replace artist, but assist them." Well 40 years later CG animation has all but replaced hand drawn animation and A.I. will replace everything soon
I am an artist who likes to draw and paint pictures, however there are times when I would have liked to have a computer assist me at increasing the quality and the output of my artwork.
It's easy to look back at the early days of computer graphics and mock, so that's what I'm going to do. 🤣 Seriously though, the future that Cheifet alluded to towards the end of the programme about real people being replaced by computer graphics and animated with words has now arrived, something that even the old comments in this video had not yet been realised.
The year is 2023....and I'm currently playing Starfield Premium Edition Early Release. The reason I bring this up is to compare where we were in 1983 to where we are today...40 years later. It's truly staggering to see the little art program they play with at the beginning of the show compared to what I'm playing right now, mind blowing.
When showing the Airplane demo in this episode, I could only picture their expressions if a time traveler were to show up there and let them see the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator, and that you can travel all around the world in that PC application. The advancement of computer graphics have gone so far now.
I would love to send a modern GeForce or Radeon HD equipped i7 complete system back in time to these guys and see wtf they say. I'd install a few modern games and send it on it's way. Gary Kildall might have died on the spot.
I'd send them a $30 cell phone or raspberry pi and tell them how much it costs and how we basically throw these things away every 1-2 years that are thousands of times more powerful than a super computer from 25 years ago lol. makes you wonder what will be possible in another 25 years..
Guys like Kildall would realize the technical possibilities were within reach. He just would not understand how the use of such systems are utilized for trivial things, such as watching porn. immediately to his mind would be, "What kind of atomic research is this system being used for in 2018?"
silicon graphics were always leagues ahead of the normal pc business. but their hardware would cost a fortune, $50,000 or more sometimes. those would be used by the real professional markets, universities, movie studios etc.
They knew, through Moore's law, what could be achieved. What they couldn't conceive are the implications to how society would use the technology in everyday life. This is exemplified right in this video where Stewart asks the SGI VP what purpose would anyone want to have with a computer capable of this - everything "professional" was mentioned, but nothing about how it would just be gaming for everyday people that would drive the mass sales of these devices. Just like the effect of the Internet on society today - keep in mind they already had online system back in the early 80s, even ecommerce, but nobody conceived the average person would be doing what we are today online.
@@oldtwins I remember while talking to a friend of mine in 1992 that one day we would be watching movies at home over the internet... He laughed so hard while telling me that it would never happen, that technology would never have that kind of capability and even if computers could pull that off, get this... that «people would never stay home to watch movies on a small screen». Brother was he ever mistaken.
@@cubematrixstudio7605 And now a large percentage of folks watch movies and tv shows on their 5" phone screen XD while they have a 40" or larger TV. (Which btw is considerably bigger then TV's were back in the early 90s)
@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- Yes, we are doing technology wrong. Back in '69 people looked at very low res images from the moon on large screens (cinema) or large versions of the blurry photos (newspapers). Today we are looking at high res images from Mars on very tiny 5" phone screens...
Lurker1979 well it is the same the difference between 3d and traditional hand drawn animation is that there is less monotony work (repeat to draw cell after cell, color the in cell after cell) but more to set up. Even for the final rendering you need specialists to make it run quick and gives good results. And it is so harder not to make them float in 3d animation. Wait habdrawn is mostly soulless monotony? Why has it more soul according to some snobbish hipsters?
The Commodore, MSX, and other computers at this time were years ahead of IBM compatibles at this time. It's a shame more of them weren't showcased on this show at the time. They would have set imaginations on fire.
Watch what Atari 400 could do in 1978. The thing was far ahead of Apple 2 and IBM XT and in many aspects better than Commodore C64 (only RAM was only 16KB because it was the most expensive part of homecomputers until about 1983).
Yes with the trusty motorola 68000 cpu absolute work horse in the late 80 and 90s. Then came the video toaster and lightwave and it was all over... well in the TV world at least
Amiga 1000 was fairly expensive (not more than IBM AT) but nothing like a Paintbox or SGI, those AFAIK e.g. had hardware antialiasing, which was the cat's meow of that time. And Paintbox AFAIK could use live video pixel coordinates instead of RGB colours as pixel values in a picture, and so map realtime distorted live videos into bitmap graphics.
6.5 million floating point calculations per second. The GM200 processor in my machine now is around five and a half trillion floating point calcs per sec.
Nope. First digital flight simulators were by Evans & Sutherland in late 1970th with much more impressive graphics (using many million $ expensive supercomputers). On my driving simulator history playlist are many examples.
And here we are commenting and sometimes mocking this outdated technology. But let's just think for a second how ridiculous and backwards our current technology is! Technology is growing at an extremely fast pace (almost exponentially). One can only wonder where Quantum computing and AI will bring us. Talk about a game changer that will make all of us reading this, stone age clowns.
May be quantum computer AI brings us right into a world of Butlerian Jihad (see "Dune" novels), i.e. a mankind that had barely survived a rebellion of machines and so outlawed most kinds of AI to survive (or stay the dominant species) and learned to use mystical capabilities instead.
