Stellar Memories

I was cleaning out a closet today, and I ran across this old picture.

It’s from one of my first days at Stellar Computer. Like a lot of small companies, we had a bulletin board with everyone’s picture on it. The interesting bit was how the pictures were taken. On one of your first days with the company, Mark Davis would sneak into your cubicle wearing a monster mask and holding a Polaroid camera. When you spotted him, he would snap your picture. As a result, our board had lots of pictures of people with their mouths open and their eyes bugging out.

I guess this must have been 1986. The book in front of me is probably the rough draft of the instruction set for the GS-1000. Before Mark came in, I was probably trying to figure out how in the heck we were going to rewrite the clipping stage of the render pipeline to take advantage of the vector unit. We had a lot of fun figuring that sort of thing out. It was a really fun machine to program. It was one of the only machines of its generation where the entire rendering pipeline was programmable. As a result, we were able to do a lot of interesting work with unusual rendering techniques.