[markus.kummerer]

Dear forum readers,

I would like to ask, if forum members could provide information about the canceled InfiteReality successor Bali.

Markus

[vishnu]

John Airey was the technical lead on Bali, just do a google search for patents in his name, he got a bunch of them for algorithms that were going to be a part of Bali.

[jwhat]

Hi Vishnu & Co,

found this, without looking very hard ..

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-airey-2009691/

Given the number of retro-computing and vintage UNIX meeting happening in USA, it would be great if an Irix Network member arranged an SGI session and you could invite people like John to speak (if hey was interested).

I saw videos of such session with: Woz, Brian Kernighan (bell labs), Ken Thompson (Bell, Unix) and Michael Toy / Ken Arnold (Rouge).

All made fun viewing.

Good to get out of chat box and into the real world ;-)

Cheers from Oz,


jwhat/John.

[vishnu]

I'm a big fan of Michael Toy, a superlative IRIX engineer who jumped ship with SGI founder Jim Clark to form Netscape in early 1994. As I'm fond of pointing out, for anyone who hasn't read Jim Clark's book "Netscape Time," correct that mistake by reading it at once...

[markus.kummerer]

Dear vishnu,

Thank you for your very helpful information. I was particularly interested, if Bali would have supported a concept like pixel shaders in hardware. Turns out, John Airey filed for a patent in 1998 (link).

When reading the floating point rasterization patent (link), I noticed the name Robert A. Drebin. According to this article on Anandtech, Mr. Drebin had a key role in enabling Retina displays in Apple's MacBook Pro (link).

[mapesdhs]

Somewhere I have some NDA docs for IR5, but not sure where I've put them. Can't recall much said at the time about what was to come next.

Ian.