From: broehl@sunee.waterloo.edu (Bernie Roehl) Subject: Re: TECH: My standard is better than your standard. Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1992 13:32:14 GMT Message-ID: Organization: University of Waterloo In article <1992Aug3.071844.14163@u.washington.edu> steve@cse.fau.edu (Steve Smith) writes: >Are you honestly considering implementing this over 9600 bps? Yes. >I think it is clear that the bottleneck is in bandwidth not >the speed of the CPU/ graphics subsystem. I disagree; I think either bandwidth or horsepower could be a limiting factor if we come up with a bad design. If we come up with a good design, *neither* will be a limiting factor. >With your basic RISC box under $5000, processing speed is not so much the >issue it was 3-4 years ago. Again, the question of "minimum hardware requirements" comes up. My feeling is that in order for virtual space to be an interesting place to spend time in, it has to have a lot of people building (and playing) in it. The higher we set the entry requirements ($5000 RISC station with specialized graphics hardware and a T1-speed connection to the Internet) the less likely it is that anyone's going to bother with it. How much interesting software is being developed for Cray supercomputers, versus the amount being developed for PCs and Macs? The more people who have access to the environment, the more interesting and useful things you're going to find in that environment. Why does everyone use PCs? Because no matter what you want to do, someone somewhere has already developed the tools. This is less true in the Mac environment, because fewer people have Macs. It's even less true for Amigas, and even less true for Indigos and even less true for Crays. The higher the price of admission, the more exclusive the club... and the more lonely it is being a member of that club. Saying "We've got to have RISC boxes and fibre-optic connections in order to do *anything*" is like saying "we'll never buy that VHS crap; Beta is a much, much better standard and will prevail in the end". >Pretty soon we can move to FDDI or CDDI and run at 100Mbps. Pretty soon *you* can move there... but you'll find yourself almost alone, for a great many years, while a thriving virtual world evolves around you. >Any system can handle 128 bit coordinates... the issue is performance. And we need good performance for VR, or the system will be unusable. -- Bernie Roehl, University of Waterloo Electrical Engineering Dept Mail: broehl@sunee.waterloo.edu OR broehl@sunee.UWaterloo.ca BangPath: uunet!watmath!sunee!broehl Voice: (519) 885-1211 x 2607 [work]