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Comment by entropyie | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

:-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.

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