User:Natepotter16/sandbox

= Traces: Blender's Precursor = Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, three decades ago. If you ever wondered when and where some of the most iconic Blender conventions like "right-click select" or 3D cursor originated, it’s then, in the Amiga era, even before Blender was born.

Blender's earliest days begin with the Commodore Amiga, that in 1980's was the only affordable multimedia platform in existence. It was so early, that the term "multimedia" had not been coined yet. There, on the Amiga, "Traces" was born, a precursor to Blender.

It’s an interesting artifact, a true representative of its times, when there was hardly any 3D software that ran on home computers, as this traditionally required the power of mainframes and millions of dollars in hardware to operate. Then, in 1985 Commodore Amiga came to the market and changed everything. When the famous Juggler demo appeared, spread on floppy disks all around the world, suddenly every aspiring coder was rushing to code his own raytracer, and Ton Roosendaal was no exception.

Traces: Early Life
The company started with 2 people, with Frank van Beek as co-founder and business partner and Ton at the helm. Frank was a much better coder than Ton, and in the end he was more of a 2D go-to, while Ton did the 3D stuff. In 1991 they hired their first employee, the company grew to 7 people in the years after.

In the first year, the company hardly had any commercial jobs making 3D animations. In 1990, they got their first 3D animated jobs, and it was clear they would never be able to offer the quality the industry would demand. At that time I was already eyeing Alias, Wavefront, Softimage… the stuff used in Hollywood and by big TV stations in order to process more and become integrated with the industry.