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I wondered if I'd see a post about VISION* - I worked at GeoVision way back when as well.

I'm not sure if it's quite what's being looked for, but it does date from the 1980's and back then, had users world wide. The product (or the concept anyway - there can't be much of the original code left) is still alive and well.

The ex-GVC unit was most recently aquired by Autodesk. See

http://www.autodesk.com/prods/vision /index.htm

for more details.

As far as I know there are still a few of the original developers involved with the code...

Good Luck!

It isn't about games for everyone. Games are great but I personally would rather see the acceleration hardware aimed at major CAD vendors (Autodesk, PTC (ProEngineer), SDRC (I*DEAS), Dassault Systemes (CATIA), UG Solutions Inc) rather than games because that would help me more. 3D graphics available today are really pretty slow compared to what I really need. (and yes we have some pretty high end hardware to work on too) Try rendering an entire plant in 3D with product in it and flying around in real time with a reasonable level of detail. (no you don't use a CAD system for this, you use dedicated VR or 3D simultion software like QUEST) The currently availlable hardware still only permits fairly crude cartoonish models. It has been quickly improving though...

Actually what I'd really love to see any of them release their products for linux, but that's another topic... (funny thing is, most of them have unix versions already so it shouldn't be all that hard a port)

I've worked with just such machines, only on a smaller scale, and I have one fundamental complaint, the resulting object becomes imported as a mesh.

Oh, fine you say, thats the same as 3D studio uses, thats swell, right? wrong.

During the past year I have painstakingly reverse-engineering the childrens toy the bumble ball. This was done all in Mechanical Desktop 4 and Inventor 2.

Because of the details involved with the interior mechanics, I, along with my partner, when we turned to 3d studio to produce an animation, we found that mesh is nooo substitute for extrutions and constraints. Since the entire bumble ball is round, and all its features as well, the triangle constructions were autrotious. When we made a 3d model out of it using Stereo Lithography (SLA) it wasn't at all as nice as we had expected.

And then I looked over to all the other groups who were also reverse engineering things, and saw they're troubled 3d studio projects, and i simply refused to use it. I was happily rewarded when I was given the oportunity to use inventor 2, which, in accordance with autodesks file formats, is built on extrutions and constraints. Mmmmm...

Later into the year, when we were nearing completion, i saw what some students had '3d scanned', and it was a mess. What happens is that the scanner doesnt pick up a chamfer or a c' sink hole or an array, the object imports as a mesh. Mesh's might be swell to look at, but they're worthless to work with.

Ok, i'm done ranting. Oh, and by the way, I'm a sophmore in high school. :)

/nutt

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And please dont comment on my spelling..

Tom,

According to this story there were problems with the software on the Jubilee Line extension.

"It was called Moving Block Signaling, and they wanted to move the train along in electronic envelopes. About a year before it opened it became clear it wasn't going to work. They decided to put in conventional color light signaling, which the line was not designed for."

I would be interested to hear your take on this.

In the past I worked on a project which was certified for ISO9000/Tickit. The process involved producing many documents. Unfortunately the time needed to produce the documents was under estimated. This meant that the coding phase was squeezed, leading to poor code (lacked attention to detail & had limited unit testing). The end result was a system which was worse than similar systems with low levels of documentation.

I believe that AutoCAD had Un*x versions up until AutoCAD r13c4. I still wish they did though... :(

I really wish there were some nice 3D modeling and rendering programs like trueSpace and 3DSMax for Linux. I guess that is my rant... I don't like using Windows, but I have to for 3D modeling and CAD... :/ (And I don't really like Blender very much.)

-Phil

Actually I think that Visio would compete more with Actrix than AutoCAD. Maybe it might try to compete with AutoCAD LT in some areas. I've never used Visio so I don't know what its capabilities are. I use AutoCAD R14 w/ Softdesk Building Services (now in limbo over support for AutoCAD 2000) since I work for an electrical contractor. I've looked at the demo for Actrix and it seems to do what people are talking about (diagraming various things). Our AutoCAD vendor tried to get us to buy it (~US$395/seat) for doing ladder diagrams for electrical equipment but we went elsewhere.

Microsoft strikes again.. "Visio is slated to be a division within Microsoft's Business Productivity Group." Sounds like they're going to shovel it in with Office Pro or something.. I imagine that companies that use both products will be happy, until Microsoft manages to screw it up. What's next? Autodesk? Could happen.

In fact, the Xanadu Operating Company (XOC) was funded by AutoDesk (of AutoCad fame) for about five years under the pretext that the Xanadu system would make a dandy archive/retrieval system for AutoCad design files. That it also tickled the imagination of AutoDesk founder John Walker was a happy coincidence.

I was involved in a week's worth of discussion with the folks at XOC (and ESR) about turning USENET into a "coarse grain" hypertext system (after all, every article has a world-wide unique message-ID, required by the transport, and the software can use "references" like links), but there were a number of issues we didn't have clean answers for, and the discussion never resulted in software. Besides, now we have DejaNews as an archive of USENET, also Alta Vista can search it, too.

Anyway, when Carol Bartz became CEO of AutoDesk, she cut a lot of things (AutoDesk was in financial trouble at the time), and XOC was one of the casualties. Now, one could well ask why, with five years of funding, XOC never produced anything that the market saw...

I think the principal failing of Ted Nelson's dream was the almost relentless drive for perfection, with almost no "real world" testing of the incremental versions of the software - no one associated with the effort wanted to release anything less than complete and perfect.

Result: nothing was ever released (until now).

It'll be interesting to see if the code lives up to the decades of hype about it.