Ars Technica has the beginning of what looks to be a great series on the history of the Amiga computer.
The Amiga 500 (example shown above) is probably my favorite computer of all that I’ve owned, built, or re-built. I lusted after it during high school, purchased one just before heading off to college, and used it for so many things while in my first few years of university. I was amazed at the multi-tasking, and I learned a lot about ray tracing just goofing around with some of the programs that came available during that time. While at the University of Washington, I started up an Amiga user’s club, which was great fun. In the middle of my time at university, I took the machine apart and hacked on the internals a bit. I wanted to modify the machine to have a small, separate keyboard kind of like the IBM PC-AT. The project involved oak, stained plexiglass, solder, and… let’s just say it didn’t completely work out. It worked, but – what a damn mess.
I’ve met a few of the people involved with the Amiga development over the years and I always feel like such a fan boy when I meet them. It’s an amazing thing about our industry that our “legends” are still around. Be sure to meet them and thank them if you used their computers of played their games! (Speaking of which, isn’t California Extreme coming up?)

…for dinner!
This is cute. Apparently an early predecessor of Cookie Monster. And an early predecessor of the PC.

I just noticed that Mark Cerny will be giving a talk on the PlayStation3′s graphics chip, the RSX, at GDC 2007. I know that Mark was intimately involved with this chip and has a lot of opinions and expertise about it. If you’re going to be at GDC, and you’re working on the PS3, this talk is a Do Not Miss!
RSX Best Practices, from Mark Cerny (Cerny Games), Jon Olick (Lead Programmer, Naughty Dog), and David Simpson (Lead Programmer, Naughty Dog).

This evening I attended a reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA… it was a party for the alumni of the computer science program at the University of Washington.
The reception itself was good, though frankly I didn’t recognize a single student there. I did see a few professors I recognized, most importantly my senior project advisor Tony DeRose (now at Pixar). Gordon Bell and Dennis Ritchie were also there, which was pretty freakin’ cool.
I’m happy to see that my department is doing a bunch of research related to video games. They’re also in a new building! Which is great, because the old building… well, it wasn’t so great. In fact, it was coming apart. But I still have a soft spot in my heart for it, since I spent so much time there.
In any case, the Computer History Museum… is incredible! It was a great place to reminisce… and think “hmmm, I’m getting older!” Except the good news is, I was surrounded by even older people. At one point a young graduate and a much older one were talking to each other. The older one points to a TRS-80 Model I and says “That was the first computer I programmed on!” (It was for me, too…) The young grad walks over to the abacuses and says jokingly, “this was mine!” Sheesh. Kids nowadays. Hhahahhaahah.
Anyway, the exhibits at the museum were incredible. The place really is just like a big warehouse full of junk, only the junk is all organized and labelled and has historical notes added, and some of it has been refurbished and is working. There are a lot of prototypes there, such as of the Apple Newton. But the most impressive things are the huuuuuge old mainframe computers (ENIAC), and the huge new mainframe computers (Cray Y-MP, etc). They also have the old Galaxy games from Stanford (the Computer Space game that ran on the PSP-11, not the production arcade units), and incredible galleries of memory and long-term storage media over the years. Really wonderful stuff.
My favorite exhibit was this huge disc platter, probably 3 feet in diameter. In the center of the platter was a tiny little hard drive – an IBM microdrive. Both discs were 1GB: the large one was 40,000 times larger than the small one. Aaaaaamazing.
The Computer History Museum has some good images on their website under “Visible Galleries”. But you should really check it out in person. Highly recommended!

George Lucas spoke at Siggraph today, and I have to admit, it wasn’t a very good keynote. They had a two hour time slot for him, and spent the first hour giving the annual Siggraph computer graphics awards. The second hour was a “Hollywood event guy” asking George generic softball questions and basically giving him credit for inventing the computer graphics industry. I’m serious.
Anyway, at least we got this cool X-Wing in the front lobby as part of the package.