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Comment by ABS | Hacker News Reader

I still remember when I used to leave my 386 sx 25Mhz running all night to render very simple scenes with POV-Ray (somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise!).

And the extreme excitement the day I upgraded to a 486 dx 33/66 Mhz which, thanks to the math co-processor, rendered those same scenes in (10s of) minutes instead!!

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Same here. But I took it pretty far. Wrote a primitive keyframe animation program using pascal that would compare two .pov files (generated by Midnight Modeler) and output a file with the differences replaced by a clock variable you would pass when rendering for animation. It was fragile and required you to apply all the transforms you would need to the scene before you started. The order the transformations were applied could also produce unexpected results. It worked best for camera movements. I used it for a senior year high school project in 1998 to make an animation (that started off as a super hero story and was truncated into a funny commercial when I ran out of time.) I definitely fondly remember the feeling of waking up in the morning to see how the rendering had turned out, it also felt powerful to have my 486DX2 50 hard at work while I rested. Writing the keyframe program definitely felt good, first time I felt like I coded something useful. One frustrating aspect was that the computer could not smoothly animate the resulting videos except in lower resolutions, so the finished product changed resolution depending on the scene. It was eventually all put together in a vhs camcorder. https://youtu.be/80hp5YSp4Co?si=XQqXIdYtHssgoQz3

Are you me? :-D Same story, had an AST 386 which I upgraded to a 486 DX33... I learned to program in the 90s by writing povray scene files, which taught me C style syntax and primed me to write actual C/C++/Java in the years that followed. I spent thousands of hours with povcad and povray on windows 3.1...

:-D I already knew (some) C, lots of Turbo Pascal and Basic by that time so I would generate povray scene files using a small C program I had developed which took various equations as starting point to plot spheres on the curves

Hah, same except my dad showed me how to write a simple search and replace using a DOS batch script to generate many files to then pass into the renderer.

I used it to do camera pans, lighting effects, etc.

Stop showing off, guys ... ;-) About 30 years ago, I let my Atari 1040STF (8Mhz, no hard drive...) scratching a floppy disk all night long to render this very blob : http://csi.chemie.tu-darmstadt.de/ak/immel/graphics/povray35...

You ddos'ed your university home page. ;)

No the Atari is still rendering to this day!

Maybe he'll get to use the "that would be impressive except if they had known what they were looking for,they would have seen it written on my dorm room window" quote later today.

Lol, I also have some povray renders still online on my uni page... Not linking though ;-)

I feel like the privileged guy in the room, as I was running POV-Ray on a fancy new SPARCstation back in those days.

Seems like the Atari was repurposed into doing duty as a webserver…

(Kidding. Posting links on HN is basically a community load test.)

I find it surprising that it would cause issues. There are as of this writing only 162 comments in the thread, which was posted 17 hours ago, and the (simple!) web page is still very slow to load. How much traffic slows down a static web page with a single image? Even if we stipulate a quite manageable 100 requests per second, that means 6 million people read this thread and decided to click that link. 6 million people and only 162 left a comment? Can that be right?

>Even if we stipulate a quite manageable 100 requests per second,

Depends on the situation, but 100 requests/seconds sound like a lot to me (depending on how heavy the processing is, of course). And every page visit generates 8 requests, so that's "just" 12 people visiting per second.

What were you modelling? Cyclopropane? I did something looking similar using a Fortran tool called Gaussian not long after.

Also are you me? Except I had a 486sx and I tried in vain to persuade my parents to buy a maths co-processor for it. It would have probably saved them money in the long run from electricity bills.

Some of my first programming was writing QBasic programs to generate povray scene files.

I had a 486dx and it was such a huge upgrade over a 286. I ordered pov-ray from some shareware catalog since I didn't have internet access, and it arrived on 3.5" floppies.

What on earth this was me too!! I still remember leaving my 486 rendering all night after I had messed with the computer and disconnected the CPU fan. Several hours of sleep later there was a loud blaring alarm, because the CPU was about to overheat. It took like 4 hours to overheat! Can't remember what rendering tool it was though.

What 386 owner hasn't rendered that sample POV Ray scene with a glass of wine? It made me feel that my beloved computer could do "professional" graphics.

Then you would find the NCC-1701 from some BBS...

I didn't. I was too busy rendering that sample POV Ray scene with a sunset.

I'm old [and stupid] enough to remember running a floating-point-only raytracer on a non-FP PC using a software-emulated math coprocessor. I think I measured output in *hours per frame*.

My personal record was 50 hours for a single 640x480 scene on my Pentium 100 MHz. Memories...

Moray modelling program in Dos. Fun times

> somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise

Sometimes white noise helps with sleep, so this may not be that big of a surprise.

yes, but that wasn't white noise I assure you :-D

Especially if there was classic IDE HDD grinding involved :D

I loved that deep scratchy bass, modern hard drives are so quiet... I miss sleeping to my computer defragging all night long :(

Not all modern drives. One of mine goes "thunk thunk thunk". I could hear it from rooms away in one case I had it in.

I've had 24x7 FIDO node in my room for years. I've silenced modem pulse dialing by replacing relay with expensive one. I've silenced CPU cooler by using 90mm 12v fans connected to 5v (yes, in 486DX era). But HDD was unbeatable.

On the other hand, if I wake up in the middle of the night due to HDD grinding, I was sure that I have new mail (echoareas) to read!

Pedantic nitpick: you are most likely talking about a different 'colour' of noise. White noise is really harsh, and probably not what your fan produces.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

I couldn't remember the color (brown noise?) so white noise was the best thing I could come up with.

No worries. When speaking colloquially, 'white noise' is a perfectly fine term and perfectly understandable.

my dad wanted to buy a 486sx, i convinced him to go for the more expensive dx for povray and factint...

Yeah. I know now about the int in fractint :D

And then Terragen.

It was VistaPro, for me. So many hours of fiddling with variables, and rendering new worlds.

I spent so much time on VistaPro on my Amiga 1000. I later bought a 2000, then an 030+FPU card. I was a rendering madman for the next month.

ahh. Fractint.

Same here! I still have some fairly simple 320x240 images that took all night to render.

yes! I did the same thing, although I never got a 486 and jumped to a amd k6-2 with Blender when it came out. Never had the math co-processor either, although it would have been nice.

Color cycle mode was so rave too.

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