Just today I saw a picture of my second computer: A Macintosh LC II initially purchased to write my Honours thesis tech specs here
It has a processor of 16 Mhz and 4MB of RAM.
My first computer was a Fat Mac 6Mhz CPU and 512KB RAM used to write my undergraduate assignments upon, purchased from the ANU in 1989.
Both were second hand and at least a couple of years out of date.
I taught myself computer graphics on this machine while working in a laboratory as a molecular biologist, following instructions in the manual.
The way these images were created is you wrote the scene markup in a text editor, and then kicked it off from the command line, waited for between ten and one hundred minutes got the image back.
Put the command line into a loop or an animated scene markup and even more hours and you get back an image sequence.
This also meant that if you could log into someone else’s machine and compile the software you could let them calculate for you.
There are some mainframe CPU cycles misappropriated in making the images above I am sure.
The software that I used to make it still exists:
Perisitence of Vision Raytracer : POVRay
The way I was able to find this artwork from back in 1995 is because I artchived it on the internet.
Sam Hodge on SITO the nineties version of deviant art..
The titles are completely non sensical, but I was a 23 year old kid back in 1995 so forgive me.
Its pretty incredible that now I have thirty one credits for computer graphics in broadcast media:
My Movie Credits are listed here, (note how ten years of time elapsed between making these images and getting the first movie credit.)
Anyway, as Paul Kelly said “.. from little things big things grow”.
Sam
Let me repeat, no Graphics User Interface was used to make these images, just me and a text editor and a compiler along with a whole lot of patience.
If you want to model a love heart check this out