I began my 3D graphics development on a Symbolics workstation at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-80's. This was before the S-Graphics suite was released. [0]
The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler.
And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp.
But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems.
Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads.
This thread brought back memories of what could have been a game-changer for Lisp in graphics: Whitney/Demos Productions.
This was a company set up by the founders of Digital Productions of "The Last Starfighter" and Cray XMP fame. Their system was based around a Connection Machine and Symbolics workstations, with development to be done in Lisp.
Unfortunately, they folded almost before they started, due to their funding falling through.
One can only imagine how that might have changed the 3D production landscape.
The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler.
And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp.
But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems.
Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads.
[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking...
[1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9