When I was at Intel working on a high end graphics chip
I joked with one of the design engineers that it would
be cool if you could see little armies fighting but we
both agreed there probably wouldn't be enough CPU /
graphics capability to do that in real time, at least
not in our lifetime :-)
You really didn't think that would be possible in your lifetime in 1983? I'd think that would have seen pretty feasible by then, seeing as there were games on mainstream computers doing that not even a decade later.
Heck, I bet you could get something resembling that working on a 1985-vintage amiga.
I realize that this is an off the cuff sort of comment but two things stand out, first you have give credit to the Amiga as it was stunningly better than anything else when it was released in 1984, and as wonderful as it was, Populous (perhaps the first game will small isometric animated battles) didn't come out until 1989. In 1983 running Microsoft flight simulator on the CGA card was state of the art :-).
Since I was at Intel at the time neither one of us expected computers to get 1,000x better than they were at that moment in time (the 80286 @ 10Mhz woo hoo!) I was driving a BARCO 1024 x 768 RGB monitor that cost Intel $3,000 to purchase, they were predicting it would be under $1,000 in the next 10 years or so. Its hard to have little animated pieces running around recognizably on a pixel budget of 15 x 15 and perhaps 8 bits per to select out of a color pallet of 4096.
So the photo realistic stuff we saw at Siggraph we didn't expect would be 'real time' in our lifetimes, certainly not at anything close to affordable a price. And yes, we were way off base, but that is the nature of things.
It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).
I'm not directly involved in tech/hardware and I'm imagining full on reality-quality 'virtual reality' beamed into people's brains within 20 years. I imagine those in VR would scoff at this, but I'm kinda hoping I'll be closer to the truth ;-)
Hah, being a grad student in machine learning I feel this quite strongly. The popular science perception is that computers are already close to being smarter than us (BS articles about Turing tests don't help...), whereas it seems like if we truly reach computers that "think", it won't look anything like what we're doing now.
> It's funny how being closer to the reality and more informed about the technology can mean one's guesses about the future are more pessimistic than people making pie in the sky guesses (think scientists versus sci-fi authors).
Bill Gates has an interesting quote about this phenomenon, for which I forgot the exact wording... it says that you are always wrong as to how fast things will occur, but you are also wrong when you think stuff will not be available for a very long time. There's many examples of such assumptions being wrong now and then.
Seriously, the PC took years to become State of the Art when VESA local bus freed us from IBM dictating the game with E/ISA and ceeding control by trying to force MCA on the world.
Yes, and in fact Gordon was still Chairman of Intel, but the thing about exponentials is they are always S curves. The trick is knowing when they are going to taper off and go flat :-)
Heck, I bet you could get something resembling that working on a 1985-vintage amiga.