munkees said:
You place must be a ton of screens. It really found that what you do with those systems is truely amazing.
Well, you know if you look at things from, say, 10 years ago... like magazines, movies and the like, the quality of the workmanship isn't really any less than today. So even old equipment and software should be able to produce quality work... even if it takes a little longer or a few more steps.
My SGI Indy, in it's current configuration, would have been a $27,000 system back in 1996. Between the time I bought it in 1999 to today I've spent about $1,100 on it (I just spent $25 replacing the power supply that died last week). I've more than earned that much from using the system in that time.
As for the monitors... yeah, I have a lot. My friends refer to my computer area as
Mission Control. This is a quick diagram of my computer area (what should have been the living room of our apartment):
and this is a quick set of images of the room (remember, I'm sick and wasn't expecting company
):
I would like to find more out about blue and yellow box, I have hard about these before and have yet to know and understand exactly they are.
In 1997, a friend of mine was working on a secret squire project at apple with Raspsody, i believe it was Raspsody, it was unix with is swtichable interface to a classic look and feel. It was cool, we were going to develop a game together, I had just writen an simulation engine.
Actually the best place to start learning about Rhapsody is my web site...
www.rhapsodyos.org.
I've been using Rhapsody for years and realized that a lot of the sources for information that I had are long since gone, so I've been trying to make sure that there is still one place on the net that people can find out about this operating system.
I actually spend most of my time in Yellow Box in Rhapsody. I own a lot of Yellow Box software, so I can do quite a lot of things with it. And as it turns out, most of those Yellow Box titles are still around today (as Cocoa apps) and are what I use in Mac OS X.
I have been spending a lot of time in Blue Box lately, mainly because I'm usually already sitting at the 8600... and it handles memory better than the regular Mac OS 8/9 (memory management is handed over to Rhapsody).
Rhapsody would have been a nice environment for developing games. John Carmack worked with the Omni Group on Quake II for Rhapsody, and even got it ported to Rhapsody before it was ported to Mac OS 8. Carmack was an early fan of Rhapsody, which isn't surprising as he was also a NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP user too. He developed DOOM on a NeXTstation, and continued to use the platform for aspects of the development of Quake.
Do you have plans to get an G4 / G5 or intel in the near future ?
I was planning on getting an older G4, but two of my clients gave me Beige G3s, so I've decided that I'll see how far I can push those. I'm sure that some day I'll get a G5 and an Intel based system... I just tend to not get new systems.
Oddly enough, the reason for getting the Quadra 950 originally, and the reason it is still around today, is that it was my dream machine back in the early 90's. It was faster than any Mac before it, it could take twice as much RAM... and it was just an impressive piece of hardware to see in person. But at almost $10,000 I sure couldn't afford one (I had an SE/30 back then). This one I got for $150 back in 1999.
I would say that the original dual processor G5 is my
Quadra 950 of today, so I'm sure someday I'll have one. Plus I'll need a new(ish) system sometime in the near future (my iMac I bought new in 2000), so if the Minis are Intel based, then I'll have an Intel system.
Thing is, most of my most used software is already Universal (and was back in the Rhapsody days, which is why I get so much use out of my old ThinkPad), so a change in processor isn't going to effect me too much.
Mathematics. I started out as a Physics major back in the late 80's (in fact it was an ad for Theorist in
Physics Today that got me started on using Macs), but switch to mathematics when I found that I had an aptitude for visualizing aspect of geometry and topology.
With the help and encouragement of my professors I was quickly taking graduate courses and doing research (at first in differential geometry, then later in differential topology). I even got work doing math for some engineers and got a summer job at the NSF Geometry Center (on a combination NSF/Dept. of Energy grant).
The problem was that I got so caught up in my math that I sorta forgot about the reason I was in school to begin with... to get a degree. I have enough undergraduate math for a bachelors and enough graduate course work (along with my research) for a Ph.D.... but I didn't finish things like a couple writing courses, a visual arts course, a US History course... the little things that Universities want you to finish before you even start on the things I was spending all my time on.
Add to that a painful divorce in 1997 (I married one of my high school teachers back in 1987... but that is another story), and my education came to a stop. I came out to Minnesota in 1997 to see a professor... and ended up staying (I needed to get away from San Diego for a while).
About two years ago I started talking with the mathematics department at the U of M (which was the school my main professor at UCSD had gone to) and they seem to think that it would be best to skip the whole bachelors thing all together and just start back in on my graduate work. Plus my professor retired from UCSD and moved here.
So after years off from math I'm getting back into the swing of things... slowly. Plus I don't have a lot of money for classes yet.
Well, I bet that was a lot more information than you wanted.
