Well, wait a minute, which part? Commercially available microprocessors back then weren't fast enough to render 3D graphics the way they can today, but otherwise, most of what we do today was perfectly achievable then: if anything, UIs have declined since then because we're putting everything on the web (for pragmatic reasons) rather than writing custom desktop applications.
Everyone stopped using xrdb more than twenty years ago, same things for drawing primitives.
I understand the wish some seems to have for things to never change. It's probably very comforting but things have to move with their time or they will be left behind.
Those were very interesting times for the desktop. I remember slooowly backing off all the effects after changing Nvidia drivers and restarting X for the Nth time. :-) Eventually just stuck with nv or nouveau or whatever it was. I loved drawing with particles all over the desktop, but little tweaks here and there started to make the whole thing really complex.
He was modernizing it on top of X11, which is still pretty far from a modern compositing window system. Also it looks like much of the challenge was even just identifying when drawing was truly complete. That problem doesn't go away by just putting a compositor in front.
It's hard for me to capture the level of nostalgia I have for those 4px graphical elements that you could use for graphics. They allowed you to control graphics with the conditional logic of Basic. I had so much fun making animations with different scenes.
I miss how difficult it is to get into graphics programming nowadays. DirectX and OpenGL have somewhat high learning curves for new programmers (especially kids). Even the "simplified" graphics libraries are usually OOPified and take some learning.
The only time I had access to Renderman documentation was during my thesis, porting a particle based visualization engine from Objective-C/NeXT Cube into a plain Windows/OpenGL 1.1/MFC.
Reading that, alongside "The Renderman Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics" was eye opening how far behind regular PCs were from such graphical workstations.
Naturally that was about 20 something years ago, very interessing to see how much Renderman has moved beyond that, and the evolution of programmable GPGPU as well.
That suddenly brought back a memory of the first 3d rendering code I did - it was written in Basic on an 8086 machine running DOS 2.1. Not only did it take several seconds to render, it was only an unshaded wireframe line drawing. To be fair, there were techniques available at the time to make it quite a bit faster that I didn’t know. But it still blows my mind a little bit every time I think about how far things have come since I was a kid.
I did come back to it as an adult. Spent a while doing 2d and 3d graphics. It was much easier as an adult but rendering involves too much of this math stuff and I gave up. Definitely not for equipped to shine as graphics programmer.
Which brings us to my original point - not everyone can do it (well).
well this was 1989 ..... as I said prior to this state of the are was fast vectors for CAD, and before any of that we didn't have many per-pixel framebuffers (memory was so expensive so you got stuff like CGA/etc or plain ttys)
I used to do graphic demos in Pascal, in 286 mode, using hand-coded procedures in assembler for the graphics parts, using Mode X for buffering the animations, like 320x240 resolution, 256 colors and only one virtual screen (although more were possible).
Doing 3D was pretty cool too - I couldn't do fancy stuff, but I could display and rotate 3D objects, drawing only visible polygons, draw textures and even have simple lighting.
To me it seems weird how kids work these days. I don't know what a pixel shader is for instance.
Probably used scaleform. It was used by many games. It was a massive headache for engine programmers. The thing really had very very poor performance... I think it was always heavily hacked so that it could run decently, both the actionscript side and the scaleform side. At least that's what a programmer did for a year to get something decent. I can't believe it could have ended up anywhere else with that tech. Still, it was amazing for artists.
The middle two and bottom right of the first pic make no sense to me. I don't get this nostalgia. One of my first C projects was a failed attempt at using opengl to do a 3d desktop environment. Still frustrated at how archaic the desktop and webui is. The future is held hostage by the past.
In mine, which was pre 2000 (I'm old), we were doing matrix multiplication by hand to ensure we understood how the underlying transformations worked, building our own renderer's, and so forth.
Yeah, I remember messing around with Mode-X and SVGA video modes, then writing code to plot lines, circles, Wu pixels, Anti-aliased lines and all that stuff.
Years later at different jobs I was able to use the accumulation method used in Bresenham's line drawing algorithm to do some neat integer based graph drawing and scaling.
Heck from what I remember, half of the compsiting stuff that's done now with compiz/kwin in modern desktops was pioneered with E17 development, they used Xgl before the accelerated compositing was possible with GLX_texture_from_pixmap and the like.
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