This image is a screen photo of the first 3D image I ever rendered! It was made sometime around 1980. At the time I was working for Philips Research (in Redhill, England) on a 2D Paint program - and late one night I was reading about fractals and the new-found applications for 3D graphics. I decided on a whim to try to draw one using the paintbox hardware. There was no Z buffer - so I rendered far to near. I didn't understand how to render triangles - so I wrote something <shudder> that drew a fan of closely spaced lines emanating from one vertex of the triangle. The image has about 65,000 triangles, no texture and no smooth shading - except in the sky.

There were no colour printers back then - but we had a machine that could take a polaroid screen shot with a nice long exposure. The white line across the middle of the screen is where the photo got folded at some time in the distant past. The irregular dark green bands are where I ran out of colours when the menu redrew at the end of the rendering. The four white dots were due to a problem in the hardware which tended to overheat when left running for too long - causing RAM timing errors. The plain pinkish area to the bottom-left was actually painted in by hand because the terrain didn't quite reach the edge of the screen. The fractal origins of the program are evident in the long, straight crease lines that are visible in a couple of places in the image.

For all of those problems, it's still an image I'm rather proud of.

The image took all night to draw - and when I came back the next morning, I was utterly amazed. My boss (Simon Turner) was impressed too - and this single image lead indirectly to a small research effort into realtime 3D - which got me enough self-taught expertise to get me into flight simulation.

The paint program itself was pretty novel at the time - running as it did on a relatively cheap computer. The Quantel paintbox (which required large minicomputer) was state of the art at the time.

(This image was rendered on a computer called 'C.H.R.I.S' which was a research machine intended to show what a home computer might look like. The display was a 256 colour device using a hand-built frame buffer driven by a hand-built MC68000 computer - mice didn't exist back then - so this used a digitizing tablet. The OS was written to the bare metal - and used an early 5.25" floppy drive). This computer was also used for some of the earliest experiments in using Compact Disks to store computer data - the CD-ROM started on the very same screen you see in this photo!