[vcf-midatlantic] Old Video Game Advertisements

[Dave McGuire]

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

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA