The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah | Hacker News Reader

The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

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327 pointssohkamyung120 comments

The University of Utah was also the fourth node of ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet - https://www.lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/arpanet/

On a personal note, this is also part of why I exist at all.

My father came from England very young, worked his way through agriculture jobs in California, and somehow found himself with a job offer at the u of u as an electron microscopist. Met my mom there. Details are fuzzy and not retrievable from the dead. For some reason this job required him early access to the „internet“ in the 80s.

In 1994, we were, as I was told at the time, one of the first families to “have internet” in Utah. We had a dial up connection that lasted 15 minutes before needing to reconnect. As anyone my age remembers, that was about as long as it took to load one webpage with one image.

It was a massive influence on me and my neighborhood friends in countless ways and I’m eternally grateful for what came of it.

East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).

The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.

After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.

Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.

A high school with a T1 connection was pretty sick! I don't know quite how to translate it into terms younger readers can appreciate.

5 gigabit symmetric right now, if you're American.

The thing is, nobody in the US cares about the network any more; it's been good enough for twenty years. I don't even know how fast mine is. It was very different then. People had modems that pushed 9.6kbps, 14.4kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6kbps, then 56kbps. Each upgrade was substantial because it was the limiting factor -- I remember each one, as you can see -- and obviously way slower than that mythical T1.

> nobody in the US cares about the network any more

Definitely not true if you live in a rural area.

I can personally attest to this, until I moved out to the city, I was significantly kneecapped in terms of what speeds I could have and it had an impact given how many services just implicitly assume you have high bandwidth and more or less lock you out if you don't. And I was one of the "lucky" ones in the sense that I was on a well known national cable provider, heaven forbid you were on telecom DSL or (for the really poor sods out there) V.92 or ISDN.

Is this true? I thought it was closer to 5 megabit.

Skyline High School had a teletype terminal by 1978. I think it connected to the University of Utah, though I am not absolutely certain. But that was a long way below a T1 line...

I recall in the late 70s that my high school also had a teletype terminal and an IBM card reader that connected to a mainframe for the whole school district. As a student I had some awareness that it was unusual. I was also working PT at a Radio Shack at the same time and saw the first arrival of a TRS-80 to our store.

Despite that early exposure to computing technology I went other directions for the next couple decades.

Some Utah school districts still use the k12.ut.us domain in places, for school and grade management: https://skystu.jordan.k12.ut.us/

1994 was way way after dialup Internet access was mainstream (both Yahoo and Amazon were founded that year). Any first access in the state would be sometime in the 80s. By 1993 there were already national level dialup ISPs.

> that was about as long [15 minutes] as it took to load one webpage with one image.

Very hyperbolic. A simple webpage with text would load in seconds on a 28.8k modem. A single image would usually be a 10s of kB in those days, so maybe some seconds, not even a minute.

This is not correct for access open to the general public. The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was founded in 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access through the University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown, the founder, had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had quite good internet connectivity). But most people did not if they weren't associated with a university.

(I helped create the third public ISP in Utah (ArosNet), in 1995).

V34 (28.8k) was only ratified in 1994, and many ISPs were still at 14.4 at that time. Many customers still used much slower modems - 9600 remained quite common.

The commercial Internet really only started taking off in 1993. Not by coincidence, that was the same year NCSA Mosaic was released.

Wow, Utah really lagged on getting an ISP, huh?

From a UK perspective: my family got dual up in ‘94, there were lots of ISP options & it was basically impossible to buy anything slower than 28.8k new (at retail anyhow, I’m sure you could special order) as no-where stocked them. 28.8 took over fast.

I think the UK had lots pf ISPs at the time because without a local number to call it was VERY expensive rather than just kinda expensive. But that’s just a guess.

Population density helps a lot with internet access. Distance to COs is smaller, easier to wire, shorter backhaul, etc. The salt lake city metro area had reasonable density but, particularly 30 years ago, it wasn't like .. most places in the UK or Europe.

Commercial ISP. People had dialup internet access before there were commercial ISPs.

Yes, I’m aware. That’s what I was talking about

I was still fighting local telcos in Canada in 2003 to get filters removed so I could go above 9600 baud.

I moved to Canada in 2002 and my 56k modem worked just fine and I'm pretty sure (though I might be misremembering) cable and ADSL were already around (I think people were amused that I was still using dialup). I'm sure some other parts were behind.

I think I had Internet access around 1984 or so, lived near a university (this was not in the US so must have been some early international connection). Before that we had BITNET (IBM's network) and uucp. My first networking from home experience was with a 300bps modem to an IBM mainframe using a terminal program I wrote myself on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It was a pretty crappy half-duplex but pretty exciting as a kid.

A trip down memory lane...

This was St. Josephs Island. As soon as we had a little WiFi based ISP up and running suddenly broadband was available. Wonder why...

> This is not correct for access open to the general public. The first commercial ISP in Utah, Xmission, was founded in 1993. Yes, many of us had internet access through the University of Utah before that (Pete Ashdown, the founder, had worked at Evans & Sutherland, which had quite good internet connectivity).

> The commercial Internet really only started taking off in 1993.

1993 is before 1994.

I am very much scratching my head by how this contradicts anything I stated in a way that makes it not correct.

If a commercial ISP existed in 1993, then by 1994 plenty of regular people would have been getting internet access - without any special affiliation other than a credit card - ie mainstream. (Per your own comment “many had internet access before that”) - those affiliated were among the first to have internet access is a pretty reasonable interpretation and that was well before 1994 in all of the continental US.

It wasn't "way after" in Utah. Xmission turned on in October 1993. They grew a lot in 1994 but most people in the valley still did not have internet access yet. By 1996 the situation was very different - but 94 was still early in the Utah Internet days. The growth in Internet adoption was so rapid during those 3 years that the difference just between 94 and 95 was quite large.

And yes, many faculty, students, and staff at the U had access. But that was like 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.

Ok not “way” after - really splitting hairs here. Point still stands public commercial dialup internet was available pretty much everywhere. Call them early adopters or whatever - but the internet already had established communities well before 1994.

> 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the interpretation of what “first families”. In the context I read that post it sounded like someone saying they were among literally the first few, not 50k to 100k when anyone with a credit card could order service. First families in my interpretation would be those that probably had access from their parent’s university shell account. This follows with the claim 15 minutes to load a single webpage - but unless you were on a shitty rural phone line running 2400bps it’s not like everyone’s dialup internet access at the time was that limited. Some had to put up with that but the tech in 1994 was not that primitive.

50k had access if they wanted it. Most didn't use it. I'm confused why you don't believe me that internet penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in 1994 - I was there, I ran an internet service provider, and prior to that, I co-ran the largest multi-line BBS in salt lake. I'd been doing dial up for a long time.

You may be assuming that your experience in a different location applies to Utah, but I think that you're really just shifted by a year. The GP almost certainly weren't actually one of the first families in the sense of dozens, but they could well have been first among people they knew in their area. 15 minutes is probably hyperbole.

> I'm confused why you don't believe me that internet penetration in the salt lake valley was very limited in 1994

I do believe you. Really have no dispute with any details you’re putting down.

I suppose the distinction I’m making is about the cohort of early adopters that had special (usually U access) from those using commercial ISPs or BBSes. That earliest cohort no matter how small it was a good bit earlier than 1994 and eternal September. I’ll grant my wording inadvertently exaggerating the penetration of availability in 1994, just saying the first households were probably getting dialup some years prior.

For me an EE prof managed get me a shell account in 1990 while in middle school. Even in rust belt US many friends just used AOL into 1994 and uptake of dialup ISPs was still slow, but that 1994 cohort was distinct.

My first dialup was to BBS's in the early 80s using a Novation AppleCat[1] and I think I was using The Source[2] around the same time, which eventually got swallowed by CompuServe[3]. To access The Source you dialed in to Telenet[4] first and then connected from there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

I think my first Internet access was through Prodigy[5]. The Wikipedia says this wouldn't have been till 1994[6], but I remember it being a few years earlier since by 1994 I would have been using AOL.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)#Conve...

My first significant Internet access was at U.F. in 1995. While at U.F. I was also the sole system administrator for a small ISP in Gainesville. Two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston PortMaster with a dozen Hayes modems attached and a T1 for uplink.

My family also piloted something called Viewtron in the early 80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewtron

AT&T marketing video for Viewtron:

https://youtu.be/sgYkpk9nJnE

I would say dial up Internet was far from mainstream in 94, even with was widely available.

I'd argue it wasn't until 96/97 when "everyone" started using it and membership didn't quite peak with services like AOL until 2001.

The internet was still the land of the nerds until the early 2000's

It's difficult to generalize. It definitely depends on your location, and especially population density. Before 1995, it was mostly nerds and early adopters. By 1995, in the north east US, dial up internet had definitely gone mainstream. Local ISPs had ads on the radio. A new one was popping up everyone couple of months. By late 1997, early '98, broadband services (@Home cable modems, DSL) were starting to roll out.

The Netscape IPO, in summer 1995, and also the release of Windows 95, really marks the "mainstream" period. Getting online with Trumpet Winsock and Windows 3.1 was a PITA.

> The internet was still the land of the nerds until the early 2000's

The first dot com boom, sort of the genesis of fortunes that make this site exist was prior to the early 2000s.

The early 2000s was the bust period.

Right, unless the backhaul was massively overcommitted... which was normal at the time because it was really difficult to sufficiently provision backhaul, even a few months in advance. The internet was certainly not fast in 1994.

Anyway, since when does the truth need to get in the way of a good story?

You assume 28.8, good phone lines, and a responsive server. Sometimes it was an old 9600 because it was all you could easily get, noisy lines, and the server on the other end being slow because the picture was popular. Then a page could load for a minute, with pictures and all.

Not 15 minutes though.

Dialup services were available. Most had little to no internet connectivity. The few services dedicated to internet access were not mainstream yet. MS was preparing to deploy MSN 1.0 with no internet because that was just a hippie fad.

I remember having dialup in 1994 through xmission. It was the same year my dad installed Slackware on our basement computer.

There's a rivalry between the NBA fan bases of the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets. Commonly this manifests as little jabs Rockets fans will make, mocking Utah for not having internet.

Always funny to see this brought up when Utah was one of the first places on the planet to have the "Internet".

The Jazz, like Jim Clark, were another transplant from New Orleans.

> Details are .. not retrievable from the dead

You inherited your dad's British humour :)

The U of U still has a large block of public IPs that they use for all their "internal" systems. No need for NAT there!

That was at least 100% true as of around 15 years ago. I know the CS and engineering departments are still using that block. Hard to imagine that it still holds true for WiFi APs, etc and the proliferation of devices.

That's how the internet should have been.

I can only imagine how cool it must be to be raised by early adopters of internet technology.

I can somewhat relate to this story in a couple coincidental points. First is that my father being a relatively early adopter of the PC in his professional life as a civil engineer in the early 80s, while an internet connection was about twenty years in the future for him, and the second one is that I learned electron microscopy on a Jeol microscope from 1994 when I was doing my master's in material science.

And this is my first comment in HN. I hope everyone is doing wonderfully well.

Most of the discussion on this thread is about my timeline of saying we were one of the first families with internet in 1994. First of all, I did try to qualify it with “as I was told” - i was a kid and all I knew was what my dad and the internet told me - but I was writing that comment with haste and on second thought, the timing was certainly more like 1992. Also, I didn’t say that’s when we got it, just when he told me that. As i said before, he had it in the 80s. Just to throw a wrench in the discussion. Also yes, it was hyperbole to say it took 15 min to download an image, but just barely and just for the fun of the story. Love you all and your pedantic asses.

1994 already feels a tad late in my memory, everyone at my high school already had email in 1993, and we knew several families with internet in their house by 1992.

Are you saying that you were made during one of those 15-min waits?

Great story thanks for sharing. We come to HN for this :-)

During my internship, I worked at Evans and Sutherland, which was just off of the University of Utah tech park and was a major part of the UoU graphics world. I worked on what I think was the last generation of E&S image generators. It was pretty cool, especially the realtime phong shading (this was the 1990s!) and calligraphic lighting (sort of like a vector display that overdrew the normal displays and made things like point lights look incredible!) in the actual flight simulators.

The company was visibly dying at the time and I didn't take their offer to join, I just had other plans, but the engineers were incredibly welcoming. One of the people I worked with went on to be an imagineer. I with I had not lost touch with them, the guy I reported to was a great guy.

It was just an amazing place, but the writing was on the wall. GPUs were just starting and I looked at the rack full of gear that was the image generator and thought: yeah, this is all going away soon. That was, in fact, exactly what happened.

Speaking of E&S vector displays: as a young volunteer at our local children's museum[1] in the early '90s, I spent many pleasant hours screwing around with a first-generation Digistar planetarium system, which was essentially a vector projection display with an enormous dome-shaped screen driven by scripts running on a MicroVAX in the back room that could be interacted with via a variety of controllers — joysticks, faders, etc. — on the planetarium floor.

Sadly, this interactivity was never used in an official capacity while I was there; all public shows were fully automated affairs. But this didn't stop twelve-year-old me from simulating starship combat in between shows and after hours!

Computer-wise, this was one of the highlights of my childhood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children's_Museum_of_India...

That's why you see this at the computer history museum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot

sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DBenchy

Further immortalized through the 418 I'm a Teapot HTTP error code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418

AFAIK, the 418 status is more a reference to coffee making than to the Utah Teapot.

Yes. It's an error code for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (RFC 2324)[1] and the author[2] has no Utah nor particular graphics background.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Masinter

Computer graphics > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History

History of computer animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation

Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny

Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Yeah, I don't really get what happened there. They found out 20 years later than it was a cropped image from Playboy, and eventually both Playboy and the model were fine with it being used for research purposes. Then another 20 years later people re-discovered this and now it was sexist?

Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree that it was probably well past time to update a reference image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.

FWIW, this isn’t an accurate summary of what happened with the Lena image at all, and the story and reasons behind it’s decline are easily available online. If you want to understand it, maybe it’s worth looking up?

Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity, and respect in research. The journal Nature says “the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering”. [1] The paper “On alternatives to Lenna says “ Whatever its merits, the Lenna image’s origin is incompatible with our community’s sincere attempts to encourage diversity and respect in Science and Technology”. [2] (And references “ A centerfold does not belong in the classroom”. [3])

It’s more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work- most people understand why that’s a bad idea, regardless of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might not care doesn’t mean everyone is okay with it, and even if you don’t care about it, it’s still clearly unprofessional.

I’m sure it’s completely unintentional and that you and parent comment don’t mean to sound unsupportive of our social advances of women. I’m sure like most people here you actively support and encourage women to learn and work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold...

> Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom

Isn’t it more like if female researchers used the cropped head-only photo of a Chippendale’s guy in an image processing paper?

Shifting it to an “interfacing with an authority figure for children” role is not really fair IMO, as I think that is why most would find it distasteful.

The situation isn’t being shifted to interfacing with an authority figure for children. That’s what it already was! Maybe not primarily, but don’t miss the very point that research is setting an example and it percolates widely outside of college journals into textbooks, onto the internet, into videos, into work, and into homes. The movement is centered on the simple idea that we need to take the fact that we’re setting examples for young women and young men alike slightly more seriously.

I’m pretty sure the reason why people are against the image being used is that <insert field here> (image processing in this case) used to be a male dominated field, and the use of an arguably contextually misogynistic image could make female researchers in the field uncomfortable and/or less included, etc. I really don’t think setting an example for children has anything to do with it.

Your summary is accurate, I agree with it, though the question of whether Playboy is “arguably” contextually misogynistic isn’t really even up for debate, it’s a well known fact that lots of women (and men) have repeatedly pointed out for decades. The issue with Lena is more than the potential that it could make female researchers uncomfortable, it actually did, and some of them were kind enough to let people know, and ask politely to consider more carefully what that makes the field of research look like to outsiders, and whether it is truly inclusive for women if we demand the right to keep using a pinup in research and act incredulous if anyone doesn’t like it. That makes us seem immature.

I don’t know what you mean by “children” or what you’re reacting to exactly, since I didn’t make any specific claims about children, but where is the line? Do you consider female high school students or college students to be children? (I’m old enough that I do.) The movement to stop using Lena is about having the entire field of computer vision set a better example all around, for young people and adults, for men and women. There is a particular emphasis on what using Lena in research looks like to high school and college women because we have a history of accidentally excluding women from tech, and high school & college are the times when kids really decide what they want to do, right?

> I don’t know what you mean by “children” or what you’re reacting to exactly, since I didn’t make any specific claims about children

I’m reacting to this: “Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive”

I don’t have a strong position on Lena elimination, I just think that comparing the situation to teachers or nurses hanging up an explicit or sex-related poster is ridiculous. I brought up children because I think the reason why teachers or nurses hanging up posters like that is obviously offensive is that those are professions which have a large and direct day to day exposure in-person to children. Image processing researchers do not share this trait, so the comparison is invalid IMO. If you said the same about, say, mechanics or factory workers, professions without direct exposure to children, I don’t think it would be as obviously offensive.

> we demand the right to keep using a pinup in research

It isn’t itself a pinup, it looks like a still from a regular film and the image itself isn’t explicit at all. I think calling it a “pinup in research” is an exaggeration. The fact that it is actually from Playboy is sort of an in-joke in the field, since I don’t think anyone naively looking at the image would think that (I certainly didn’t when I first saw it).

> we have a history of accidentally excluding women from tech

Do you honestly believe that things like Lena have a significant effect here? I think women’s perception of tech being a place for men is primarily influenced by it being, in fact, full of men. Spending time on matters like this is counterproductive because it makes people working to improve equality in the field seem petty.

> Do you consider female… college students to be children?

Absolutely not, and I find the idea insulting to female college students. Women having children at that age is accepted in our society, so I have no idea how they could themselves be considered children without seriously altering the functional definition of the word child.

> Do you honestly believe that things like Lena have a significant effect here? […] I think calling it a “pinup in research” is an exaggeration.

Yes, and not because I suspect it, it’s because I happen to have seen women testifying to this fact. Your language for multiple comments continues to insist and insist on downplaying the issue and disregarding the stated wishes of people who are sincerely pointing out a legitimate problem, and the stated reasons that professional journals like Nature have put on record. There are no longer any technical reasons to use Lena in publications, none. And by and large, it is done and over with, nobody uses it anymore. You can nit-pick and argue over the degree of the problem all you want, and rather than proving that people are exaggerating or being unreasonable, whinging about it now mostly makes it seem like you want to preserve and defend this mildly misogyinist symbol & behavior. Insisting that it’s not a problem, when you’re part of the in-group, is exactly how cultural bias persists.

In 1984 in the U.S., almost 40% of CS degrees went to women, after growing year over year for decades. Since then the number dropped to below 20%. Meanwhile in other countries, like India, for example, there have been years where it was over 50%. We have hard evidence that we are somehow limiting equal opportunity and making CS unappealing to women. It’s a fact of history that Lena was and is considered by many people to demonstrate the attitudes that are pushing women out of CS. So what do you want to do about that? If you don’t believe it, then offer a plausible and compelling alternative to what the problem is and how to fix it.

> I find the idea insulting to female college students. […] I have no idea how they could be themselves considered children without seriously altering the functional definition of the word child.

“The legal definition of child generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority.” (Age of majority is 18 years in the U.S. - typically a freshman in college.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child

How about instead of arguing about trivia, we just agree to listen to and respect people’s wishes, especially when outsiders point out that the in-joke isn’t particularly clever or tasteful and makes us look like Beavis and Butthead?

> The situation isn’t being shifted

Really? Then what male researchers were hanging posters of Lena in classrooms?

What do you mean? Lena is one of the single most-used images in computer vision, it’s been on literally hundreds of posters, in papers, textbooks, conferences, online. The Wikipedia article talks about it being used in college and high school classrooms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

I'm pretty sure it was to 99% used in research papers.

I reject your accusations. Claiming without evidence that the Lena image is harmful is about as absurd as claiming the face of the statue of David is harmful. That's another often used picture, and of course completely ignored by the breathless "sexism!" yellers.

David wasn’t made with the intent to be pornographic. Lena’s picture was. Being unaware of the evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t any. There’s plenty of evidence of the mild bias inherent in the use of Lena, if you actually want to find the evidence. Lots of women have mentioned their mild discomfort with seeing it in a professional setting. There’s a documentary about this story called “Losing Lena”.

I appreciate all of your comments in this thread. As a female researcher in graphics - there is an awkwardness to that image personally. But, I don’t speak for all women by any means.

It’s a small discomfort, nothing earth-shattering. I wouldn’t have made it very far in CS if I couldn’t handle it. But, it adds to the pile of other small discomforts of being a woman in CS/tech. And that pile is large and cumulatively results in a tense experience.

I’m more bothered by these responses than anything, bending-over-backwards to justify the necessity of the image. Come on, guys. Switching the image is a gesture, and a nice one. It’s not that hard to be considerate to your female colleagues. But, in many cases - most even, you don’t have to be if you don’t want to.

Thank you! I’m trying but smh yeah this level of argument never ceases to surprise me. We need more women in tech, and we need to figure out how to collectively want to be considerate. Good luck in your graphics research & career! I really mean that because mine is full of luck, and I might not have made it if I’d had a non-stop stream of small discomforts. Graphics is super fun though.

When someone experiences "mild discomfort" when seeing David (it does display an idealized nude man, which could also be said about the Lena photo, which is far too artistic to be merely called "pornography") then this is still no reason to banish the David photo. If everything gets banned that someone could potentially be mildly offended by, then we would have to ban a hell of a lot of images in research and academia. Another commenter made a comparison to Christian puritanism. A devout Christian might be offended both by Lena and by David. Or think of a devout Muslim woman being deeply offended by the sight of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

You’re comparing Playboy to da Vinci and Michelangelo… if you refuse to see the difference between soft-core porn made with the intent to be sexual and titillating, and art made without any such sexualized intent, then we’re having an unproductive conversation. BTW I’m with you against silly bans, I’m a proponent of free speech. In this case nobody banned anything, the movement is nothing more than a request by a broad group of people who care about cultural bias and understand how hard it is to undo, to stop using a specific pinup image for research because of what it symbolizes (porn and antiquated/misogynistic social attitudes), and people are completely free to ignore that request and keep using Lena if they want. You can keep trying to relitigate this issue if you want, but the ship sailed a while ago, this is just history now, and I was just trying to explain what happened since your comment somewhat, and @johnnyanmac’s comment both made it clear you guys were unaware of the full story.

> You’re comparing Playboy to da Vinci and Michelangelo… if you refuse to see the difference between soft-core porn

The Lena image was clearly artistic. If you want to call it, additionally, "soft-core porn", then you would have to do the same with this statue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_of_Knidos

The article contains some sexual context. And then you have no basis of treating David differently, except if you arbitrarily discriminate against one sex but not the other.

> BTW I’m with you against silly bans, I’m a proponent of free speech.

That's nonsense, you did nothing except defending the arguments about alleged sexism.

> In this case nobody banned anything

Completely false. There are journals which ban it, see Wikipedia article. Additionally there is now an indirect ban due to the campaign succeeding in creating a strong negative association, which makes using the image so costly that it isn't a live possibility anymore: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percen...

> In this case nobody banned anything, the movement is nothing more than a request by a broad group of people

a group so broad that they then refuse to publish perfectly valid scientific research papers, if you do not comply with what is for sure not a ban, but merely a request from organisations holding institutional power.

A nonsecular humanist could take issue with religious imagery, whether the model was fairly paid, and the articles. All NN (Non-Nude) references are suspect.

"A Utah school district has removed the Bible from some schools' shelves" (2023) https://www.npr.org/2023/06/02/1179906120/utah-bible-book-ch...

Persons from Utah, are even there good examples of healthy very-heteronormative marriages in the aforementioned now unmentionable text?

>If you want to understand it, maybe it’s worth looking up?

I read several different articles from several different points of time, some obviously sympathetic of removing the image and some cynical. So I understand both sides of the fence. My goal wasn't to provide a summary so much as my overall impression.

> So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view.

The whole problem I have with this is that I never bothered looking up Lena until this comment chain, but I've seen her picture used several times in my computer graphics classes (went to college in the late 2000's, so just before the "2nd wave" of controversy).

I never knew, I don't think any one else in my class knew, and nobody questioned it nor thought it derogatory. And to be honest, the later context of this doesn't change my mind either. It is not an obviously pornographic image, the purpose of the image in its current use was not titilation.

I board on the cynical side precisely because of that; intent. And I don't think the intent here was ever to discourage nor shame women to work in STEM. Even in the 70's I simply think that some college students needed a good test image, and an on hand magazine clipping of a very high resolution photo (for its time) was the "good enough" solution as opposed to scouring stores for the perfect reference image that would stand the tests of time. Similar to other computer graphics story in that a husband/wife sitting down for tea resulted in the Utah Teapot.

I’m not claiming the intent was ever to discourage women, I’m only trying to help you understand that is still what happened despite no ill intent. You’re right that the cropped Lena image used in vision papers is no longer porn after cropping, and there’s no nudity. But it is still suggestive (you can tell she’s posing and not wearing a top), and the image comes with a story, and it comes with internet links to the uncropped nude.

The problem with the Lena image is not just or even primarily the image itself, it’s as much about where the image came from and what it represents. The source is Playboy, which as you well know, published nude women for the purpose of men’s entertainment. Insisting that nothing at all is wrong with the cropped image just because you can’t see breasts normalizes the behavior, it tells people you’re okay with the men’s entertainment part and they should be too, provided we crop the nudity. This isn’t about people being offended by nudity, or about being wildly inappropriate, this is about subtle social attitudes that aren’t conducive to men and women working together on science. It’s about being just a little inappropriate, but enough that we now recognize it’s not really 100% okay, and it reflects poorly on the field of computer graphics if we can’t adapt.

I do appreciate your reasonable tone BTW, I’m happy to continue discussing if we’re having a productive talk. I’m not trying to shame anyone either, or to discount the history of CG, I just happened to know more about the Lena saga, because I’ve read a lot about it over the years, and I believe the women who’ve mentioned use of Lena is now cringey, and I agree with the reasons for journals discontinuing it’s use. I don’t agree with the cynical view that the movement to stop using Lena is either Puritanism like one comment here said, nor just silly political correctness in a pejorative sense.

There’s a legitimate concern about using Playboy-sourced images regardless of crop, and there’s a legitimate concern about the attitude that if you don’t want Playboy-sourced images that mostly crop out the nudity, then it means you’re being a religious nut or a left-wing radical. The problem is relatively minor, but real. So let’s just move on from Lena and get back to talking about computer vision and other cool graphics!

> which recently fell victim to political correctness

It amazes me how much this stuff rhymes with Christian fundamentalism, almost like they’re slowly reinventing it.

I'd trust your instincts there. 9 times out of 10, it's not horseshoe theory, it's fundies in disguise. Fascism is syncretic. Christian fascists are more than capable of co-opting the vernacular of social justice for their radical agenda. These are the people who cancelled Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, for god's sake.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism:

""" The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. """

If Italian fascists could copy material from Gramsci (a famous contemporary communist), then fundies are more than capable of using feminist language in their quest to undo the 1960s sexual revolution.

I agree that horseshoe theory is usually not on the mark, but this seems a little out there. Are you suggesting the fundies are doing this intentionally? To me it feels more like the “everything evolves into a crab, eventually” meme.

I was totally expecting to see the teapot on the page.

The photo does have Martin Newell in it who created the famous model.

The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays.

I'm working with my limited and stereotyped knowledge of Utah, but is "line-drawing system" a easter egg reference to latter day saints?

Yes. Somewhat famously, Sutherland named it that to troll Evans, to see if he'd flinch. He didn't and thought it was funny.

Recently Utah had a small commemorative conference where the photo in the picture was taken. Ivan Sutherland attended, and gave what I thought was the best talk, about nothing to do with graphics. He’s actively doing research on Single Quantum Flux circuits at 85 years old! [1] He’s trying to spread the word that the US is about to miss out on the next hardware revolution because we’re not paying attention to SQF. [2] The talk is awesome and worth watching. Anyway, I feel like this was a sneak peek into one of the biggest reasons why that early graphics team was so successful, Ivan’s amazing. Combined with some other magic ingredients, their environment was special, and I think, sadly, unreproducible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?feature=share (For Ivan’s talk, scroll to 5:50:00 - that’s 5 hours and fifty minutes in.)

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/ivan-sutherlan...

Evans and Sutherland also developed CDRS (Conceptual Design and Rendering System) which was later bought by PTC and developed into ISDX. This is a 3D CAD tool for high quality surfacing used by industrial designers and surfacing experts to develop exteriors for automotive and consumer products. It was originally written in Lisp.

Unlike many other CAD tools, especially for its time, it described the relation between surfaces as a bunch of rules. So surfaces 'A' and 'B' could influence 'C', and then the user change their mind and decide that 'C' should drive 'A' and 'B' instead. Unlike other parametric tools which would come later, you didn't set this up by reordering a bunch of features, you just changed the connection icons between the surfaces. It was up to CDRS to figure out what order to solve the constraints and build the surfaces.

Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S.

CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler.

After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept.

I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space.

So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…

I started using ISDX in ‘96 soon after PTC acquired it and managed to port it and make it work with Pro/E. I’ve worked on a number of products which are still in production using it, but it’s been a while since I was using Pro/E (now Creo). I don’t miss Creo, but I do miss ISDX. There was a while when I was using Solidworks and Pro/E (with ISDX) depending on the project/client, but then I transitioned to Solidworks for many years. Now I’m using Onshape (started by the key people from Solidworks) which recently was acquired by PTC. Both Solidworks and Onshape use the Parasolid kernel which was first developed for Unigraphics. It seems like it’s a small world in CAD tool development.

When was that?

I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended up making a 3D Model of Escher’s Belvedere. One of the guys was going to “print” it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375 at the time.

I don’t know the exact year the CDRS group was acquired by PTC, but it be around the same time I attended the same High School Computing Institute in 1996.

PTC made the purchse in 1994 ... it's a great story if you want to hear it....

Bart Brejcha Design Engine

I used CDRS while at Caterpillar in 1997 and purchased it in the same year not knowing it was slated for the graveyard. I made it my mission to be the expert ... luckily STYLE became the cool new thing in 2001 and I was able to be expert in that right away.

Bart Brejcha Design Engine

Computer graphics has always been a world apart in computing. Even today we still have the somewhat arcane world of GPU's versus the CPU's for the common folk.

Programming-wise too, computer graphics, especially 3D, has this pronounced mathematical / geometric aspect to it that is not shared with normal applications. That has been inhereted in the game industry but remains a thing apart.

In some sense it is only now, half a century later, with the increased emphasis on data science and ML/AI that this fundamental cleavage is being repaired:

Both at the hardware side, the repurposing and utilization of GPU architectures for non-graphical compute and on the software side, the elevation of more mathematical objects like tensors (= nd-arrays) into first class citizens.

Some of that disjointness might have been unavoidable, but maybe these guys (remarkably 100% male btw) in the family photo had something to do with it.

The counterfactual would have been something like graphics enabled CPU's and more mainstream support in programming languages for the associated mathematical operations.

I've been writing 3D graphics software since '84, and a few years ago when I started formally learning machine learning I found it had so many parallels with 3D graphics, the transition was quite a bit easier than I expected.

If you haven't read Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull of Pixar, he (and his ghostwriter) do a great job talking about his work on early animation tech at Utah. Highly recommend.

Another great book that covers the early days of computer graphics work is Droidmaker [1]

For a book that is purportedly about George Lucas and his contributions, it's goes into a great amount of detail about the histories of the computer graphics pioneers were doing before they worked for Lucas.

I didn't realize the group was so small, and so influential. Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.droidmaker.com/

Biography of the Pixel looks really good as well (by the other founder, Alvy Ray Smith). Been on my list for a while

I've read "The Biography of the Pixel" book. It's an amazing and educational book about the history of computer graphics and the definition of a pixel by Smith.

yes for sure!

That picture was taken at a nostalgic symposium a few months ago. I'm very fortunate to live nearby and was able to attend. It was awesome. Got to meet a couple of my heroes. They livestreamed it as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui3R1Dlmsk0

Alumnus. We had multiple times when one of Nolan’s friends came to class and pretty much literally dumped a bunch of Atari hardware on the front table.

We got to play with stuff and hear some great stories. The U of Utah is a great place, if you like snow, physics, computers and steep inclines. And haha it even has a surprising cultural scene (there is beer.)

One of my mentors there invented that magnetic ink on checks. That was a mind-blower too!

Basically the entire foundation of computer graphics is within a couple degrees of separation of the guys in that photo.

One of the sources of researchers for Xerox PARC, mentioned in "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age"

- Bob Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient... - while at ARPA, Taylor issued a US$5M grant to the University of Utah/Dale Evans to setup the doctoral program

- Alan Kay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay

- John Warnock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock

- also mentioned in the book from UofUtah, Bob Flegal and Jim Curry, who worked on Superpaint - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpaint

Peter Shirley is a University of Utah guy right? His Ray Tracing in One Weekend series is brilliant

Pete came to Utah after a bit of a relative graphics drought in the department, right when I was trying to absorb as much as I could. I literally glommed onto him, learned as much as I could about ray tracing, started working on his path tracer, and I can honestly say working with Pete changed my life. That’s a long story, but incidentally he named his path tracer “Eon” after how long it took to produce a decent image. He’d also arrived with a codebase that predated modern C++, we often used prefixes in class and variable names. His prefix was ‘gg’ which I don’t remember what it stands for, but the prefix was so common he broke the ‘g’ key off of his keyboard.

Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis on treating software development as an engineering discipline. It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really, but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly influenced my programming philosophy ever since.

The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently good at theory and bad in practice.

Heh! One of my first big computer purchases was for an Evans & Sutherland card, as it was one of the only cards available that would run on NT, supported OpenGL and had a whopping 32 MB of vram... and it was full AT length board fitting nicely into a $1,600 price tag! (crappy drivers, IIRC)

I always wondered how different computer graphics would be if Bui Tuong Phong hadn't died at such a young age. It's crazy how much of an impact.

> Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation

Pixar!

Pixar in a Box curriculum: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar

AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model: https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... : BlenderGPT, Blender-GPT,

Pixar > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar :

> [...] Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs's first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT.[22] PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.[23]

PTT: Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres

Pizza Planet! (Toy Story (1995))

Adobe Inc. > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History

Jim Clark was a native of the South (Texas) and went to night school at Tulane in New Orleans before he went to Utah for graduate school.

The U also has one of the top video game development programs too. I decided to go back to college in my late 20s and doing that program now. It used to be part of the film school, then they moved it to the college of engineering but I heard from a progress or in July they are suppose to expand to being their own school at the U, because there’s a lot of overlap with programming, art and business (they use the term “Producer” for project managers). But apparently the program is growing and they want to offer more classes covering the entire spectrum but the people in charge of whatever college they have been apart of have been limiting what they could offer, or so I’m told from a professors Rant.

The headline suggests one thing, the article shows another:

> In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer graphics could play a role in the country’s technological competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer Animation.

While it's impressive that this could happen in Utah, it seems to have depended on a timely grant from a federal agency.

excerpt from "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC..."

"Some fields of study owed their existence to his [Bob Taylor] largesse. Among them was computer graphics, which came to life at the University of Utah when Dave Evans, a devout Mormon who had led the Genie team building the time-sharing SDS 940 at UC Berkeley, called Taylor to say his alma mater had invited him to return to Salt Lake to start a computer program. How about an ARPA project, he asked, to get it going?"

"...If Evans was willing to start such a program in the backwater of Utah, where it could develop in pristine isolation from the traditionalist thinking elsewhere, Taylor was all for it. The venture turned out better than anyone could have expected. The program Taylor funded partially as a personal experiment and partially as a favor to an old friend evolved into a world leader in computer graphics research."

Interesting and it makes sense that a backwater would be helpful, giving it a similar vibe to Skunk Works. Not too much though. I think most parts of Utah would be unsuitable, but University of Utah is pretty good. It is right up on the edge of the mountain range, and in the biggest city of Utah.

I attended the High School Computing Institute in the summer of 2002 in the CS department (before attending and majoring in physics). I did more graphics with alpha_1 although there was a simulated cassini rover in lisp program there. It was a bunch of fun. I graduated from there but switched to physics because it was easier than EE, and I didn’t think I wanted to do CS.

Christopher Johnson did some of the graphics program, which was most memorable.

I loved to go to the Hansen planetarium in Salt Lake City as a kid to learn about the night sky. I remember when they swapped out the star projector with the first digital projector made by Evans & Sutherland in the early '80s. The stars weren't as sharp as the old system, but getting to virtually travel to other stars in our galaxy and see the constellations change shape from those new vantage points was a real trip.

I would say SGI, with the invention of GPU's and OpenGL. It took off from there, not Evans & Sutherland before.

Jim Clark did his PhD at Utah. The academic program, and the nearby E&S, provided a great incubator for computer graphics talent. Stanford was where it went to the next level, with the subsequent commercialisation via MIPS and SGI.

OpenGL was originally the proprietary IrisGL, and of course SGI never made a GPU, but invented the architecture of fixed function pipelines (Geometry Engines, Texture Memory, Raster Managers). It was people who left SGI to found nVidia.

No, you’re in the wrong decade. And Jim Clark, who founded SGI, got his PhD and learned computer graphics at Utah and was part of the cohort pictured in the article, his advisor was Ivan Sutherland.

Go Utes!

Shoutout to my son, who recently graduated from the U of U with a degree in Geography (and CS minor.) He and his classmates were heavily visualization focused in/around geographic entities.

I can't wait to see what he does in the future.

University of Utah also has some really excellent free lectures on YouTube. I highly recommend Cem Yuksel's (a professor at university of Utah) channel if you're interested in learning about computer graphics.

First shape I 3D printed was the Utah teapot.

Back in the 80s there was a fantastic spool of renders which occasionally featured the teapot anachronistically flying through landscapes and effect showcases as a little private motif.

Let’s go Utes!

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