Craig Upson Now Works for SGI

[baskett%forest at SGI.COM]

Jeff Hanson asks: "Will AVS be ported to SGI ..."

As many of you know, AVS was built at Stellar (now Stardent) by Craig
Upson and his crew using some nice visualization tools, a
straighforward (and rather limiting) data model, and an interconnection
mechanism invented by SGI's own Paul Haeberli (see his Siggraph '88
paper on ConMan).  It is a nice first generation scientific visualization product.

SGI has attempted to license it from Stardent so that we could offer an
efficient implementation of it to our customers.  We have been
unsuccessful in these attempts.  They won't say no, of course, but they
won't say yes either.  It's almost as thought they would rather that we
didn't have it.  But they are no doubt busy with their other business
and we can't wait around forever, either, especially considering that
we and others know how to build second generation products that
overcome many of the limitations of the first generation product and
provide added richness as well as added functionality.

So we currently expect that our customers will have to make do with
some of the other first generation visualization products that are
available on our systems and anxiously await second generation
products.  SGI will also attempt to be more sensitive to the porting
issues for second generation products that seem to currently inhibit
the spread of AVS.

Forest Baskett
Silicon Graphics