Comment by Eric_Gullichsen
21 hours ago
Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128. It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
You lived on a houseboat named SS Vallejo in Sausalito...
Any chance it was THE Vallejo where Alan Watts lived, and the grateful dead once played? Or maybe she was just named in homage?
Either way, it's very cool! Thanks for the great read.
Yes, the S.S. Vallejo. Formerly owned by Jean Varda and Alan Watts. I lived there from 1990 until 2023.
I bet that was something! I just re-watched one of the Watts videos he filmed on the Vallejo a few weeks ago.
I imagine that living in a place with that sort of history was the kind of experience one can't really convey in a few words online, but if you have written about it (or intend to) I would certainly love to read more.
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Did you take it to Tonga with you?
I was in on the ground floor of WiFi, in that around 1995 I did a significant chuck of the work that proved that WiFi works, and my work at a university lead to the formation of a company that put WiFi into the market (Radiata). The IP situation was murky. A patent holder made about $1b and the company sold for $560m (in 2000). I gather the university complained and got a good chunk of "go away" money. I could have thrown my hat in the ring: maybe I would have got something, maybe I wouldn't have. Either way, I walked away, as I judged it wasn't worth the non-financial cost. 30 years layer I still think I made the right decision. I might have been living in a nicer house, but I wouldn't have the life I have today, which I am happy with.
I don't know your situation in life, but if your experience is anything like mine I reckon you've probably made the right decision.
Usually the university takes half of any funds, faculty takes half, and whatever is left over is split between the associated academics.
You were lucky, as most university contracts clearly state they own all associated IP created while working on campus. They could have legally given you $0, and end of employment notice. These things can get messy fast. =3
> These things can get messy fast.
Yep. I was on a fixed term contract, which had expired, even though I was still working on the project well after its expiration. It would have been interesting to argue that any IP assignment expired with the contract. As you said: messy. As I judged: not worth it.
Quads and biquadratic texture mapping truly were an awful choice and it's incredible that the company still pulled through. I have an NV1 floating around somewhere; I should dust it off again.
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.
Why did Nvidia think quads were a good idea over triangles when SGI was doing triangles? What is a holdover of Sun thinking? Was it a patent differentiation play or a patent defensive move? Or just following Microsoft's lead (and why did Microsoft think it made sense?)
Do you still program for fun ?
I’m in a small game dev group and I very much enjoy seeing how older engineers tackle problems.
Yes. I do a lot of embedded systems things and recently some agentic auto-improvement with local LLMs on a strix halo. "Older Engineers".
Thank you for your response.
I hope to have such a retirement, although my interest is primarily in video games.
I dream of making high quality games that you buy once, and after a bit I’d open source everything. I’d also love to hire a small team, I’d probably move to a cheaper country though.
Unfortunately the game industry is a horrible business if you need to make an income though.
In 1989 I was consulting for a large company in NYC that hired you to give our small UI/UX team a demo of your VR system. I still remember strapping on the headset and looking around the virtual world. I might even have your business card somewhere!
I seem to recall that large company was Citibank, and that they were surprisingly open to the strange new tech of VR. Though perhaps there were other large NY firms with small UX groups I demoed to...
Yep, that was it. Our department (Humanware) was quite forward-thinking, and an anomaly in an otherwise conservative institution. Unfortunately we never ended up using VR in any of our products! They also brought in Edward Tufte, whose show-and-tell included his personal copy of what was likely Sir Henry Billingsley's 1570 English translation of Euclid's Elements.
What was your gain on the 15,625 shares you did own? What year did you sell them?
It sounds like he probably forgot about them until his trader friends brought up nvidia. Otherwise why would he go digging through his documents upon being reminded?
How bad was the motion sickness back then and what kind of hardware were people using for the headsets?
Did anything progress past tech demos?
Frame rates were low because of limited rendering speed and tracker lag. I did a lot of VR demos starting in 1989 at Autodesk. Not much motion sickness, perhaps 2% of users. The first HMD we used at Sense8 was by Virtual Research (Bruce Bassett) with LEEP optics. And I just found out that John Ternus worked for Bruce. Small planet.
Beyond tech demos, yes, lots of customers of the WorldToolKit product. From NASA to artist Jenny Holzer. Sense8 was acquired in 1998 by Engineering Animation.
The Kingdom of Tonga stood out to me. Are you still there? Why were you there? It's a very interesting place, especially for anyone not from there. I'm only adjacently aware as someone who spent most of my life in a different Polynesian country.
Long story, but HM George V and I were good friends and business partners in some ventures. Most significant of which was the commercialization of the .TO ccTLD, in 1997, the first to compete with .COM. Do a search on my name and Tonga for details.
You sound like a character in a Neal Stephenson novel (in a good way!). I don't suppose the two of you ever had contact?
Was curious too and this came up: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/to-be-or-not-to-be-1.101984