What do a barrel of oil and 3D have in common? They both came from dinosaurs.

The stuff that we take for granted today, mip-mapping, texture
mapping, z-buffers, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, tri-linear
filtering, cubic mapping, and on and on, was due largely to developments
on the big, old iron of computer graphics, the dinosaurs. Those
giant machines made by General Electric, Evans & Sutherland,
SGI, Sun, and Cray, and huge mainframes from IBM, DEC, and Control
Data, and workstations from Apollo, Adage, Jupiter, and Ramtek,
to name a few, were the cauldrons of 3D development. Every one
of those companies, with one notable exception, is basically out
of business, or out of the (graphics) business. Their remnants
are compressed in the earth and turned into the oil that makes
the modern graphics market thrive and strive.

Today the industry moves smoothly, for the most part, thanks
to those dinosaurs. Moore’s Law is firmly entrenched, and the
big old dinosaurs have either evolved or died. GE graphics is
dead, having been eaten by Lockheed; E&S has moved out of
the graphics business and into the heavens; SGI alone hangs on
as the sole survivor of big-iron CG. All the workstation companies
are gone, Jupiter makes big multi-screen systems, and Sun has
become a server supplier. IBM still builds big machines and the
fastest in the world, but not for graphics (although graphics
do get used). Cray is a reformed distributed processor company
now, and we all miss DEC.

And
what do all these companies have in common? Two things: they were
either stuck in the tar and/or they were unable to adapt to Moore’s
Law. Getting stuck in tar is when you see your customer base changing,
and you can’t move because to so would require cutting off one
or more of your legs to free yourself of the tar pit, and besides,
being in the tar pit is a slow, almost easy death, so the companies
(this applies to governments, too) who refuse to see the facts,
who keep waiting for a miracle, who expect this fad to go away
and things to get back to normal, slowly die. Others are willing
to change, but are just not smart enough or fast enough (although
every one of them will say “We just didn’t have the finances needed,”
as if they could just buy their way out). They can’t really grasp
the notion that the thing they worked so hard on for the last
two years will cost the consumer only half as much next year and
there will new competitive things on the market that will be twice
as fast. It’s not fair. Evolution seldom, if ever, is, and so
they die. The rest evolve as best they can, shrinking in size,
finding a niche they can survive in, a smaller pond. And so they
change from a pixel-tossing giant to a, ah, well . . . oh, who
cares.

But
they were giant creative centers, those dinosaurs of the graphics
world, and we all owe them a lot. None of us, no one reading this,
could or would be doing what we’re doing today if it weren’t for
those old relics.

So the next time you see a great movie, admire the lines of
a car, laugh at a commercial, wonder at the design of a modern
skyscraper, or play your favorite game, take a second and give
a nod to the dinosaurs that made the oil for it to happen; and
then run like hell before you get eaten.