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Comment by ompogUe | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you worked with it in the early '90's, but on a Mac w/4MB of RAM, it took ~5-10 minutes to undo a Guassian Blur. The pain was real.

The way to go back then was the SGI Indigo w/96MB.

It worked best for me in the late '90's on a 9500, and even then needed an entire GB of RAM.

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Ha! In the early '90's the way to go was Live Picture [1]! Your undo would have been instantaneous!

Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the two platforms overall.

[1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-th...

Yes, I remember Live Picture! It was slick. I actually spent more time in that and Fractal Design Painter, than Photoshop back then.

Hahaha that’s Old School.

Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that focused on Photoshop’s pain points. Fauve Matisse was a little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind) after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed Xres and then abandoned.

I believe that Livepicture was fast because they loaded the full image as a set of tiles.

I also believe that Photoshop was 'inspired' to introduce layers in version 3 in response to Livepicture's layers. It was layers which caused Photoshop to explode in popularity.

Adobe then went on to sue Macromedia for using tabs in their interface. Bummer.

> Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI

It was ported over to Irix (and Sun/Solaris/HP-UX and Rhapsody) using a toolkit called Lattitude[1], sort of a reverse-engineered Mac toolbox, that translated Mac API calls to the appropriate Unix/Motif/$Whatever calls, using the native look and feel.

The earlier version was used to port MS Word/Excel to Unix. Metrowerks purchased it for porting (classic) Mac apps to Rhapsody.

[1] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...

[There's an IEEE article if you have access, which I don't:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/186761

People forget that Photoshop worked on a Silicon Graphics box. It was indeed the way to go, so long as you could afford it.

"SGI Indigo". I had one of these. Not for Photoshop but still...

"Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes (?)

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

> There are too many daemons. In a vanilla 5.1 installation with Toto, there are 37 background processes.

Comparing the output of `ps aux` on a default install of Debian and OpenBSD still gives me this feeling:)

Excellent joke.

Indy still had the best looking case, though, I think. There's something about that sliced-box appearance that's so unexpected and interesting.

I have my SGI O2 sitting on top of my Indy, just because the contrast in design ethos inspires me, somehow.

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