Nice. This seems to have resolved to a good place :) I think we have had a great balance of exhibit subject areas in the past and I hope for the same in the future. Our exhibitors, our very passionate local VC hobbyists are our lifeblood. Keep it coming, folks. Thanks for all your hard work and dedication to preserving AND showing history. Want something additionally rewarding? Consider taking a few machines out to various retro kinds of fairs and science fairs. It is a gas. Chris Falla, Todd George and I have done a half dozen or so and always a hoot in a little different way than VC Festivals. Here you see how you fair with the general public. DC On 8/8/2022 3:33 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 8/8/22 14:34, Christian Liendo wrote:
I kind of feel the opposite way but two people can look at a painting and have different perspectives.
Yes, absolutely.
But I'm not talking about having different perspectives, I'm talking about people with one perspective completely dismissing and dissing the other perspective as if it didn't even exist. I've been guilty of this at times, but for me it's reactionary, as I generally find the reduce-all-of-computing-to-games attitude to be just about everywhere now and it does bother me.
When I brought a bunch of SGIs to VCF and networked them and played BZFLAG and Dogfight, I got flack for that.
I kept explaining how things like this were huge at the time, but nope.
I can see how you'd have gotten flack for that, but it's awful that you did.
It's of course very true that people did in fact play bzflag and dogfight on those machines. But that's not what they were sold for.
At work many years ago we had two very full-blown SGI 4D/25G systems. These were visualization workstations with price tags in the range of $60,000 each which were cleared and sealed for top secret processing. People absolutely did play bzflag and dogfight on them...on lunch break. That was by no means the primary purpose of those machines. This was a weapons design facility.
What a lot of people don't get is that the source code for bzflag and dogfight was supplied by SGI, as these were intended to be programming examples for the graphics pipelines in the early GL (predecessor of OpenGL) implementations.
So, it's not like you'd have been able to do missile plume visualization and analysis on your SGIs as a VCF demo. Even if you could've gotten the software, nobody would've understood what it was, or have been able to relate to it. But everyone can relate to bzflag and dogfight, regardless of their line of work.
And if you noticed. I never demoed again... ever..
Now I go. I watch, I volunteer and clean up. But I don't really want to demo.
:-(
-Dave