Eric_Gullichsen

Hey, thanks for reminding me about that. We were inspired by Atari's Pong, to which I had devoted many quarters at the bar during my undergrad days.

Nolan Bushnell came to visit Autodesk at our invitation, and we gave him a demo of our 3D version of Pong. Later, Nolan gave me some of my first business lessons at a meeting held at the Thai Garden restaurant at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino. Memories...

I agree that VR isn't the best modality for precision CAD work, although it can be great for visualization. These days I just dictate what I want using a local Whisper instance, have Hemes-webui get my local LLM to write Python code, and then let FreeCAD generate the geometry. For me, that works much better than drawing in midair.

I had hoped the letter might be both conciliatory and provocative. For those troubled by the coexistence of apparent opposites, I recommend Hegel's sublation (Aufhebung), Crowley's crossing of the Abyss, and Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in that order.

Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7).

Ethically? Difficult question. I may not be a decent person as you posit, but I do like to think of myself as reasonable. I certainly never expected NVIDIA to say "aw shucks" and write me a billion dollar check. At the last lawyer meeting we proposed to settle for a far smaller number, which both sides agreed was reasonable. A number not picked out of a hat, but based on rather complex nuances such as the likelihood I would have sold etc.etc. derived from much legal thought. And they still made the call to say nope. I think it is perfectly clear from the options contract what the vesting term was. And certainly I erred in not realizing this earlier, before the statute of limitations tolled. Though in 1996 the stock was priced at 5 cents, so not something I paid enough attention to, not having the foresight or perhaps the necessary faith in Jensen's perseverance, intelligence, and luck. Hindsight is cheap.

Beyond tech demos, yes, lots of customers of the WorldToolKit product. From NASA to artist Jenny Holzer. Sense8 was acquired in 1998 by Engineering Animation.

Indeed. The boat was - and as far as I know still remains - one of those very special magical places on the planet. Built in 1879, and still sturdy and loved, evidence perhaps of Taleb's principle of antifragility. Some tales are in my as-yet unpublished autobiography. Kinda chilly in the winter though.

I seem to recall that large company was Citibank, and that they were surprisingly open to the strange new tech of VR. Though perhaps there were other large NY firms with small UX groups I demoed to...

(1) Not a certainty that it would be dismissed. Just a high enough likelihood that after hundreds of hours or work with my lawyers (who were excellent) and many rounds of letters and meetings with NVIDIA counsel - all very professional - it wasn't worth our time to pursue further. I have other things to do with my brief adventure on this planet. (2) Feel? At this point just sort of amused by it all. (3) Read the contracts. Carefully. In 1996 NVIDIA was 3 years before IPO and nearly bankrupt, and I was busy. Too busy to read the contracts.

Frame rates were low because of limited rendering speed and tracker lag. I did a lot of VR demos starting in 1989 at Autodesk. Not much motion sickness, perhaps 2% of users. The first HMD we used at Sense8 was by Virtual Research (Bruce Bassett) with LEEP optics. And I just found out that John Ternus worked for Bruce. Small planet.

Yeah. The issue being that at the time both the CFO and their external counsel Cooley told me in writing that 15,625 shares had vested. Those representations were incorrect. And I (quite reasonably) replied on them rather than checking the original documents. Which I did only 30+ years later. In legal terms, the CFO Gani’s 1996 letter is a negligent misrepresentation, a species of fraud under Cal. Civ. Code § 1709-1710.

Long story, but HM George V and I were good friends and business partners in some ventures. Most significant of which was the commercialization of the .TO ccTLD, in 1997, the first to compete with .COM. Do a search on my name and Tonga for details.