Blender’s Prehistory

Piotr Zgodziński shares a super cool story about how he resurrected Blender’s predecessor, Traces, and where some of its idiosyncrasies like right-click select come from. Very interesting reading, and if you want you can download Traces and run it on your old Amiga hardware (or emulator ;-).

There are many fascinating things that date way back to the times before Blender even existed, and they shaped it’s future to such an extent that they are affecting us even today. Some of the Blender conventions are rooted in Traces, a program that Ton Roosendaal coded on a Commodore Amiga computer in the 1980s. Now you can examine the prehistory of Blender in an unprecedented detail, as the program and its source code are publicly available for the first time.