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Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school the U had a summer school where you would use their alpha_1 software for graphics modeling.

alpha_1 was a system going back to the 1980 designed specifically for modeling with NURBS: https://www.cs.utah.edu/gdc/projects/alpha1/help/man/html/in...

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Yes, the UofU High School Ccomputing Institute [1]. I was accepted in '96 but already working a summer job in research park at the time (at a company w/ a commercial NURBS package) and didn't ever build a model. The coolest part is they would 3D print your model long before it being the commodity that it is today.

It'd be interesting to see a follow-up on the HSCI alumni and where they are now.

[1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~rma/hci/cs/hsci.html

I was in 2002, the last class I think. In fact, I can't find any reference anymore to the later classes. It used to be maintained, but it's disappeared.

I also recently noticed that websites historically hosted on home.utah.edu were removed. I was going to find my old model (a model of Escher's Belvedere) but it's now gone.

edit:

my model: http://imgur.com/VqPVSAj

Yes, 2002 was the last year. Prof. Dave Hanscom ran the HSCI from 1990 to 2002 [1].

I checked the Wayback Machine (archive.org), but unfortunately it doesn't have those pages mirrored. It's very sad that this history seems to be getting lost. At least one prestigious alumni (HSCI '92) that of I'm aware of is Berkeley Prof. Alexei Efros [2].

Awesome model! It's definitely one of the best ones I've seen from that program.

[1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hanscom/

[2] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~efros/

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hanscom... shows 100 captures? And for the original HSCI main page, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hsci/ there are 86 captures. Looking at Summer 2002, it appears that the hsci pages moved to http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.eng.utah.edu/outreac... which has 64 captures.

Yes, the final captures of hsci all say "page not found" (soft 404), but the earlier ones are fine.

Thanks! I was looking for ece.utah.edu, I knew there was another domain involved.

Interesting. I think he must be the son of the physics professor of the same name at the U (My BS was in Applied Physics at the U)

I think some of the links historically were also under ece.utah.edu. I might be able to find some other direct links on a few older computers which might still be in the wayback machine.

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