Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Anybody remember Sketch!

I happened to come across a story on macreate.net today about the original mac portable which although innovative for its time, came into the world in 1989 at a whopping -barely luggable- 16 lbs!

In any case, it got me thinking about some of the exciting things working on a Mac introduced me to over the years, the first of which that popped into my head being Alias Sketch! Does anyone remember? This was desktop 3D modeling at its finest, running originally on my Quadra 650 back in the early 90's when PIXAR was a mere glimmer in John Lassiter's eyes, and 3D modeling meant Unigraphics Integraph and other super expensive solutions. While it wasn't a true solids based modeler, which unfortunately left you unable to export its data easily to NC milling machines for prototyping, the rendering engine was amazing -ray tracing, bump maps, and texture mapping, you name it. While it had a big full-blown brother able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and available for thousands of dollars more, it only ran on SGI workstations at the time, when for $1,000 you were up and running in the friendly confines of the Macintosh UI creating 3D models of future worlds and future products in no time. While I haven't used it lately it still runs on my Mac at home in classic OS 9 mode...

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