Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” was on the best seller list in 1989 for more than four months. It chronicles the story of his pursuit of a German computer spy. A systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, he’d detected anomalies in his network, discovering an apparently authorized user was using…
Even before SIGGRAPH started, there was computer animation. Despite popular belief, computer animation was not created to do visual effects. The new-comer animators go to the SIGGRAPH conference to see the latest and greatest animations. However, there was a time when going to SIGGRAPH’s Film Show meant you waited with…
From Silicon Graphics’ Company Info SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is the world’s leader in high-performance computing, visualization, and the management of complex data. SGI’s vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it’s sharing images to…
The common story is that two brothers from Pakistan analyzed the boot sector of a floppy disk and developed a method of infecting it with a virus dubbed “Brain” (the origin is generally accepted but not absolutely). Because it spread widely on the popular MS-DOS PC system this is typically…
The first computer worm, dubbed the “Morris worm” after it’s creator Robert Morris Jr., appeared in the winter of 1988. It was not written to cause damage, but to spread. Morris originally had benign reasons for creating it, claiming it was to gauge the size of the internet. A Cornell…
From Pixar Studios‘, What Is Renderman? Leading digital effects houses and computer graphics specialists use Pixar’s Renderman® because it is the highest quality renderer available anywhere and has been production tested through successful use in feature films for over ten years. Pixar’s Renderman is stable, fast, and efficient for handling…
Pixar Animation Studios combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. In partnership with Disney, Pixar has created four of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Academy Award®-winning Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Golden Globe-winner Toy Story…
Invented by Bell Labs employee Larry Wall in 1987 and released to the comp.sources.misc newsgroup on December 18th, 1987, this venerable scripting language had originally been intended to manipulate text information. It was based on the C language and later went on to play an important role in the development…
Your computer probably has a “VGA or SVGA monitor” that looks a lot like a TV but is smaller, has a lot more pixels and has a much crisper display. The CRT and electronics in a monitor are much more precise than is required in a TV; a computer monitor…
IBM’s second generation of personal computers. Released to the public in 1987, the PS/2 series introduced three advances over the PC series: 3.5″ 1.44 megabyte microfloppy disks, VGA and 8514 graphics display standards, and the Micro Channel bus architecture. The 3.5″ disks and VGA can be easily installed on other…