From: "Michael B. Johnson" cdshaw@cs.ualberta.ca (Chris Shaw) writes: >>I think the most amusing anecdote about BBN's gold-plated SIMNET node >>technology is that Mike Zyda's lab at the Naval Postgraduate School >>built a SIMNET node with graphics using an SGI Indigo Elan. >> >>Cost of Indigo with Elan - $45,000 retail quantity one. >> >>Cost of BBN's SIMNET box - $300,000 (hopefully the Army gets a price >>break) >> >>The Indigo outperforms the BBN Box on every count. >> >>I believe Zyda's lab had a staff of 8 or so for this project. I have >>also been led to believe that the BBN box in question doesn't have >>graphics. Up until recently, SIMNET was text only. Gimme a break. Hey, Mike Zyda & Co. are a great group of guys, and righteous hackers, but they are doing this several years after BBN, and doing it with a commercially available box (read: economy of scale). BBN deserves quite a bit of respect for getting SIMNET up during thee same period that SGI's best box was a 3030 (or maybe even a 2400) and cost 6 figures. The BBN CGI boxes were low res but did real time texture mapping, something that only recently (i.e. the SkyWriter) did SGI boxes do. Sure they cost $300K, but that was several years ago and it was custom hardware. Mike and his students are doing great work, but don't praise their work at the expense of BBN. I have no affiliation with them, other than having a few friends that worked on SIMNET, and I've played on it. If nothing else, the fact that they *implemented* it, and the scale of it (both player numbers and distance numbers) are impressive. As for the text only crack, I don't think so... Jeez. --> Michael B. Johnson --> MIT Media Lab -- Computer Graphics & Animation Group --> (617) 253-0663 -- wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu