Notices by Monty Hayter (montyhayter@mstdn.social)

@bigzaphod When I went to college (technically CEGEP, the system in Quebec is a little different) I was in a Mechanical Engineering Technology program — there was a fair bit of time spent on allowances for machining tolerances, shrinkage when casting, thermal expansion…

No idea how much of that would apply to 3D printing, because I’ve (so far) resisted getting one — I know it would be an enormous time sink for me.

@bigzaphod Given that it was the late 80’s we didn’t have much in the way of computer rendering, so we were kind of forced to get practice in visualizing/thinking about things in 3D.

A prof might give us a part to machine with only an orthographic drawing, not even an isometric view… and then (in part) grade us on how well it mated with another part we’d never even seen.

“Fun”

@bigzaphod It’s all changed so much. I had a summer job in ‘88 working for a CAD software company, and man it was rough. It would actually do a shaded render rather than just a wireframe, but the rendering times were in the hours and even days.

Everyone was pretty excited about the then-brand-new PS/2 model 70 towers that had just arrived, with “fast” 386’s in them…

And now you can do more in free software on Raspberry Pi.

…man that makes me feel old 😜

@bigzaphod I distinctly remember the Amiga bouncing ball demo, which was mind-blowing at the time: real-time, shaded, animated, 3D rendering?!?! Never mind that it was fairly low res by today’s standards, and tied up most of the machine including the custom chips.

And now… as you said, thousands of instances on a web canvas.

(I really need to dig out my Amiga and see if it still works)