My Home Office

Circa 1996

[image of my office in 1996]

One of the nice things about doing freelance computer graphics is that I could do it from home while being an at-home dad for my two children. This is what my basement office looked like in 1996.

The office started out in a bedroom on the main floor, but we moved our daughter into that room after her third birthday, and I moved downstairs. This scene, created in LightWave 5, started out as something much simpler, just a way to plan where the furniture would go.

The 1980s Scandinavian teak furniture really was that orange. The computer on the left is a no-name 133 MHz Pentium, the machine on which this scene was constructed. The one on the right is the Amiga 2000 that I started using LightWave on, in 1991. That Amiga's long gone, but I still have the original Amiga 1000 I got in 1986.

Next to the Apollo-era lunar globe, in the shadows on the bookshelf, is a Tinkertoy model of 3D space. The real one had masking tape labels on each of the twelve cube edges, a big help to me when I wrote my isosurface code.

[wireframe image of the office scene]

Among the things that are mysteriously absent from this image are the wires. Nary a power cord or cable in sight. At the time, I couldn't afford the extra polygons. I'd used them up modeling the keyboards.