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Believe it or not, if it wasn't for Softimage, NONE OF US would be where we are today. Here is why and it goes all the way back to 1993. At that time, Silicon Graphics workstations were the only way to get any serious computer animation work done. Unfortunately, they topped out over $20,000 USD (and this is in 1993 dollars). So for pretty much everyone, high end computer animation was limited to a very limited number of people in the early 1990's. And then Jurassic Park was released. Jurassic Park used Alias/Wavefront (owned by Silicon Graphics and the great grandfather of Maya) for modeling and Softimage for animation. The world was changed overnight and computer animated dinosaurs become the face of high-end computing and an SGI Onyx Workstation was the only hardware you could get to run this software. And then Microsoft made an interesting move. Prior to Jurassic Park's release, Microsoft was just not convincing anyone that WinNT was a viable platform for high-end computing. In the mind of pretty much everyone, Windows was synonymous with home PC's and they just could not break through into the mainframe or high-end computing market. To change that, they needed to prove that computationally intensive software could run just as well on a WinNT operating system. So Microsoft purchased Softimage. Now they could have purchased some finite element software, or some CAD software but they were simply not sexy enough (that is, not many people really knew or cared to know what a finite element program does). At that time, the whole world thought that computer generated dinosaurs was the epitome of high-end computing so they had to buy the software that created those images. They could not buy Alias/Wavefront as that was owned by SGI, their competitor. So they bought Softimage and immediately went about converting it to run on WinNT. And that conversion changed our world and killed SGI. People saw that a $5000 WinNT box could now run software that previously could only run on a $20,000 Onyx workstation. That move convinced the world that WinNT was in fact a viable OS for high-end computationally intensive programs and now everyone was converting their software to run on WinNT as it provided a cheaper hardware path. And as the demand for hardware to run WinNT increased, hardware prices came down even more and the cycle continues. Once Microsoft proved their point, they sold Softimage to Avid in 1998 (obviously not part of their long term strategy). Therefore, had not Softimage been used in Jurassic Park, the move to put high-end computer animation software on something cheaper than an Onyx workstation probably would have taken a bit longer and cost a bit more....which means we would not be where we are today. So even if you have never used Softimage, we need to be thankful for it. Dave

Does this help? MICROFLOATIES.zip