Quote:
Originally Posted by JayUtah
My iPhone contains 16 gigabytes of erasable storage, which is 2,000 times the memory size of the first mainframe computer I programmed as an engineering student. That is astounding to me, but does not negate the work I did on that IBM System/370. That is because I knew the capacity of that machine and did not require of it anything it was not capable of supplying.
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I'll put it in my terms, as a computer animator. Take, for example, Finding Nemo. The movie required thousands of animators and huge banks of computer resources. Does that mean that computer generated films were not possible before such resources?
Tin Toy, a Pixar animated short, was done in
1988! Compare the two, and of course, TT is far more crudely done. But they worked with what they had at the time, and did it.
The general argument is "If we don't have the technology today, how could we have had it back then?". The truth is we
do have the technology today, and we did it with what he had back then. When we do return to the moon, we'll do so with better technology (a-la Finding Nemo). When we went with apollo, we did it with the available technology (a-la Tin Toy).
Just like when I go fishing today I can hop on a deep-see charter, and nap in the air-conditioned cabin. My anscestors paddled out in canoes. Just because they couldn't do it they way I do, doesn't mean they couldn't do it.
Sorry, I rarely miss opportunities for drawn-out, overly winded analogies.