The collected works of creepingfur

So I was doing some work at a couple fairly well know post production and effects companies down in the LA area (Sorry can't reveal names), both who at one time big SGI customers (but are pretty much all Linux and Mac theses days) and came across a hand full of Octane2 boxes in each of their data centers.

My curiosity got the best of me and I asked what these systems where used for. It turns out, at both sites, all the Octane2's are used for Matador.

It seems that some of their TDs and Artists consider Matador still the best tool to use for certain scenes, even in current motion pictures and television projects (one mentioned was G.I. Joe).

Just goes to show the legs SGI boxes and that there isn't always a modern replacement for good software. It made my week.

Elastic Reality is the odd duck of the Avid apps.

It started as an Amiga app that then evolved into a Mac, then a Mac/Windows app, then a Mac/Windows/IRIX app. The functionality is exactly the same though the SGI version can load a LOT larger data sets (128MB of RAM was all a mac of the era could handle). UI wise, they are all pretty similar. I think I still have an old Mac copy.

I would love to see someone recreate Matador on a modern platform like OS X..

I have (2) MacIvory boards - a 2 and 3. The 2 is in a IIfx and the 3 is in a Quadra 950.

The IIfx is the more interesting as it has a NuVista card - which is directly accessed by the MacIvory and has the full S-Graphics software suite - which created "Stanley and Stella", one of the first CGI animated films, as well as the whale in free Willy, the klingon bridge in star trek 3, etc. - it was the first standard high end 3d system - before SGI really got into the game - like 1986-1991 or so. It actually lived on as Nichimen Miria ( which did Gollem in LoTR, amongst others ). Genera ( the symbolics OS ) also had the fist hypertext document creation system built into an OS ( it had 100s of MB of docs in the late 80s - all hypertext ). Very ahead of it's time.

There is a copy of Open Genera ( a virtual Symbolics that was released post HW business and mutant version that actually runs on OS X and Linux instead of Tru64/Alpha ) floating around the internet. It's easy enough to find with google.

I first started using Symbolics systems 17 years ago at American Express while we where working on heuristic learning fraud detection system ( which is still used in various forms by a lot more then AMEX today - and still mostly lisp or lisp cross compiled to C ). We would develop on the Symbolics ( be it MacIvory or actual XL1200s or later Open Genera on Alpha ) as there was nothing better for our dev needs. It's really hard to explain how efficient the environment was for development. Macintosh Common Lisp got close in some ways, and Light Table ( the Open Source IDE for Clojure, etc. ) steals a lot - but honestly - it's still no comparison. I wish Rainer Joswig's site still had the videos of Genera up so people could get a first hand idea of how it works.

Anyway, we would then develop on Symbolics and then deploy on SPARC or PA-RISC after after compiling under Lucid Common Lisp. I know they had Symbolics gear or Open Genera was still in use for development as of 2002.

The MacIvory systems them selves are very interesting to use - I still use mine from time to time for algorithmic work under Lisp/Scheme or S-Graphics fun. It's definitely a different experience then any other development system i've used. These days, I usually access it via a remote X session from one of my Macs or my Tezro. Nothing like Irix with Symbolics Genera in a window

Sorry for the rambly nature of the post.. I get excited talking about symbolics..