Before there was Blender, there was Traces. Ton managed to fire up his old Silicon Graphics workstation at the Blender Institute this week and give a demonstration. The similarity to Blender 2.49 is amazing! You'll be able to try it out for yourself at this year's Blender Conference.
You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.
About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
23 Comments
wow, it looks like there in immense pain handling that :p
Blender looked pretty advanced even back then :)
forget the application the chairs are the coolest :P opps i gave this post -1 star on accident... I'M SORRY
Wow!!
Really cool :-)
Thank you soooooo much Ton for bringing Blender into our lives.
Blender is a pioneer on the open source world !
No matter what I do, I cannot live without blender in my life !
Again, Ton, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I would like to express my deepest appreciation .
the Gadget on the top of ton's monitor... is it a medieval webcam or a futuristic 3d-Scanner Device?^^
Just wondered about that one lol.
Yeah blender on an nice Indy with cam and crt ... but the Keyboard is blasphemous
I should send you the right one ;-)
No words... should have sent... a poet.
Contact!
Wow! 20 years old! :O and as Dolphindream says, blender ( or traces) looks more advanced than others like 3dstudio 4 (msdos) :)
And I'm also impressed about that old SGI computer is still working lol, here I have three of them that doesn't work anymore!! http://bit.ly/RJrmqx
Yeah, Thank you sooo much!!
One question, Why do you pick the word "Blender"?
Check the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software). It mentions it briefly in the history section.
oh ok I get it .
Thanks
Pretty inspiring trip down memory lane.
Heck, I'm going to use the 2.4x theme this week out of respect/nostalgia. Bright greys and pink verts, the colors of real men!
After 20 years remembering a program how to use must be hard. Hell i even can't remember what i ate last dinner
Did Ton develop Traces then? The article doesn't mention this.
Ton himself answers this in a comment above.
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-GDM9kmxJA&feature=related
The song is Blender, from Yello's album Baby. It inspired our favorite 3D software's name. The video was made by NeoGeo on the Amiga uses TRACES. TRACES was a ray tracing program developed primarily by Ton Roosendaal, chairman of the Blender Foundation.
It's no wonder I like BLENDER; I loved the Amiga.
Here's the color version of NeoGeo video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CdA_NMw7lc&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=SPE4850888BE5873C5
Small corrections: The Indy has been provided by Sybren Stuvel - http://stuvel.eu - who managed to get it to run the right Irix version, and hooked it up to our network (thanks dude!). The keyboard is only functioning partially, making the Indy hard to use (no F keys, no ESC, etc). The Indy framebuffer is quite slow now, I will check if it has the right configuration. We didn't use Indy stations in the 90ies but the much heavier stations called Indigo2.
Traces was a port of the same program running at Amiga - in GFA BASIC. Go figure :) I had to learn C first! Most of it was coded by me, with lotsa help from bizz partner & good friend Frank van Beek. I did the first port on SGI Iris in summer of 1991. We then used it until we moved to the near-fully recoded Blender in 1995.
At the Blender Conference we will have (most likely) an Amiga 2000 running. And! A Playstation1 running the Blender game engine, reading .blend files! I had that working in 1997.
Is that right click to select?
Wow! :D)) It was really cooool! Interpolated graphs at that time was a really cool feature as I know! Strange I didn't knew about that GFA BASIC on Amiga (I had A1200+68040)... I tried Lightwave and Aladdin3d those days but without a success.
I would like to see some old records.. from that time :) First I thought - this is it! :) Then I realized that this guy near Ton looks very familiar... :D
Wow! There's no ebay to obtain a copy?! I've an xz indy r5000 and a Max impact indigo 2 where i can run it!
Maybe they can do the next open movie on this?! XD "Tears of Blender Users"