Comments on: Lightscribe: High-Tech Sharpie Replacement

By: joseph martins

joseph martins — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:44:34 +0000

Nick, you’re too literal and you’re splitting hairs. I specifically wrote the “late 80s and early 90s”, not 1986. My facetious comment about Pixar was meant to give readers not familiar with animation some idea of the timeframe (i.e. the very early days of computer animation). I’m well aware that Luxo Jr appeared in 86 and Knick Knack in 89.

Damien is correct that the history of overclocking personal computers is nearly as old as the PC itself. While I did hack the early Commodore 64 games to create my own, and I built all of my own PCs, I did not begin overclocking hardware until I could afford it in the early 90s, when I began OCing on the x86 platform to speed up rendering. I quit hotrodding my PCs around 2001, and I built my last server (which is still in operation today as DMG’s main hardware) in 2003.

As for 3D modeling, I made do with what was available at the time. I began with DKBTrace on the Amiga around 86 (later ported to PC), and Hash’s Animation Apprentice. DKBTrace eventually evolved into the POV-Ray project - an outstanding program of which I am still very fond. And Apprentice gave way to Journeyman, and eventually, Animation Master (PC and Mac), another excellent and affordable animation application. From there I jumped into early Caligari and eventually Truespace 1.0 around 94 (through release 3.0). The last two licenses I purchased were for Poser and Bryce which I never really had a chance to fully explore. I left the modeling and animating hobby in early 2001.

I should also mention that I did learn enough on Lightwave and Studio Max in the 90s to be dangerous…but both applications were way out of my budget and only accessible through employers and colleagues in the industry. I discovered that these mid-tier applications were not substantially better than the more affordable entry level applications I had been using for years.

I have no experience with high-end apps such as Wavefront and SoftImage.

All that to say, for the sake of chronological accuracy, no, I was not overclocking PCs back before Luxo Jr. Fortunately that detail was irrelevant to the point of my post.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:46:43 +0000

For what it’s worth, you can also get a simple song listing by changing the iTunes view options to only have the data you want, then Select All->Copy. This gets you a tab-delineated list of whatever is in the playlist.

By: Damien

Damien — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:02:32 +0000

In the 80’s the main computer for 3D (aside from expensive SGI gear) was an Amiga, especially once Newtek brought out the toaster. IIRC it had 3d software available from the get-go, which still puts it in 1985. Before that it’d have been a C64, maybe. And yes, people used to soup up their Amigas by replacing the main CPU with a ~10MHz version (instead of the 7.14MHz version that they shipped with).

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:09:17 +0000

I’d love to know what kind of personal computer you were “overclocking” before 1986, and rendered on.

Luxo Junior was released in 1986, and at that time, a 4.77 MHz 8088 was the norm. Luxo Jr was rendered on many dedicated AMD bit-slice 2900-series processors.

Your post reeks of BS.

By: joseph martins

joseph martins — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 05:12:42 +0000

I used to build and overclock my own PCs throughout the late 80s, and the 90s.
Partly because I did a lot of 3D modeling and animation back then, so shaving minutes or hours off of individual frame rendering was a huge deal. I’m talking back in the days before Pixar began animating desk lamps and snow globes.

These days I’m no longer an early adopter of new technology. I read about it. I write about it. I may even dream about it. But I don’t immediately invest in it, not for myself anyway. There is simply no point. Memory is fast enough, processors are fast enough, and media is reliable enough that I just don’t waste precious budget on things that are not absolutely necessary.

Instead, I like to let new technologies and gadgetry simmer in the marketplace to let the flavors mingle like the ingredients of a good soup. If after a few years of slowcooking the products have held their appeal, I pick them up for pennies on the dollar and spice up the stuff I have at home.

Whenever I want to tesdrive a new technology, I buy it as a gift for others. People that do not have my built-in bias. This time around, I bought Lightscribe drives as gifts for teens and tweens in the family. I figured, they love that sort of stuff. And for the first couple of weeks they thought Lightscribe was cool. Then it was cumbersome. Then it wasn’t used at all. These days they use Sharpies to mark their CDs and DVDs, just as they did before the Lightscribes. They tell me it’s easier, faster and just as effective. And they’re right.

I don’t see a Lightscribe in my future.