I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?
Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.
Both programs were developed to work on high end consumer laptops, which meant being able to work on IBM PC and therefore DOS.
Those programs also were likely 2D in their initial versions in the 1980’s. They were also competing against human drafting, which was considered to be industry standard at the time.
Cost and ease of use were likely more important than other potential users of 3D software, so they went with DOS and made the transition to Windows.
3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.
There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.
I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?
Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.
Both programs were developed to work on high end consumer laptops, which meant being able to work on IBM PC and therefore DOS.
Those programs also were likely 2D in their initial versions in the 1980’s. They were also competing against human drafting, which was considered to be industry standard at the time.
Cost and ease of use were likely more important than other potential users of 3D software, so they went with DOS and made the transition to Windows.
3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.
There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.