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From: jbn@wdl1.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Keyboard Envy
Message-ID: <578@wdl1.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 01:27:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: wdl1.578
Posted: Mon Aug  5 01:27:20 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Aug-85 12:20:59 EDT
Sender: notes@wdl1.UUCP
Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories
Lines: 31
Nf-ID: #N:wdl1:3600027:000:1838
Nf-From: wdl1!jbn    Jul 22 21:47:00 1985


      Remember when computers were big and complicated and had lots of 
nifty blinking lights to watch and buttons to push, and looked really
complicated?  Now even the most elaborate machines look simple, even when
they aren't.  But this is OK.  But recently I visited an artist friend
at work.  I've known her for years, and I've seen her work at a drawing board
with brushes, in the traditional way.  But recently she got into computer
animation.  Now she sits at the controls of a machine that makes even a
Symbolics look like a Timex.  There's a seven foot rack of electronics,
packed with cards with lots of big chips on them, lots of blinking lights,
and big fans.  The keyboard has a typewriter keyboard, a numeric pad, several
pads of function keys, and six knobs.  There are two displays, one 23 inch
color model and a small alphanumeric display for the menus.  For input,
there's a joystick, a digitizer tablet, and a force-sensing touchpen
(push down hard, get a dark line, push down lightly, get a translucent line).
There are editors on this thing that make EMACS look like a toy.  The
"text editor" lets you select not only fonts, but viewpoints, color, depth,
shinyness, rotation, etc.  The hardware supports real-time hidden surface
elimination, rotation, viewpoint alteration, moving objects, color, smooth
shading, and other zowie operations on images.  All this is tied to an
adjacent video editing console, with multiple videotape decks, another seven
color monitors, another computer with CRT, a few hundred knobs, dials, buttons,
and switches, and stereo speakers.  Using this monster, she can, all by herself,
make animated videos.  But she wants more.  More megabytes of RAM.  More 
features in the video processor.  More animation software.  And she's getting
them. 

      Envy.  Envy.  Envy.

						John Nagle