Kevin
On Jun 21, 11:07am, John W. Barrus wrote:
> Subject: Re: LANG Inventor file format
> >John Barrus wrote:
> >>There are no distribution royalties for the SGI executables because every
> >>SGI comes with Inventor run-time libraries. One easy way to start would be
> >>to use an SGI to create the first Mosaic-like client using Inventor. That
> >>executable and source could be freely distributed without royalties or
> >>legal action.
> >
> >*Provided* you're only running on SGI machines, and moreover on SGI
> >machines with a recent version of IRIX (if I read the docs correctly,
> >Open Inventor doesn't run on older versions of the operating system).
> >That's a little limiting -- my company has only one IRIS, and it's
> >not up to IRIX 5.2 yet...
> >
> > -- Justin
> > Who rather likes Inventor, but is a
> > compulsive Devil's Advocate...
>
> The executable will _only_ run on SGI's (IRIX 5.2 and greater) and the
> source is useless unless you own the libraries on a machine on which you
> plan to compile the source. I'm sorry, I thought that was obvious.
>
> The older versions of Inventor (1.0, 1.1) do run on earlier versions of
> IRIX, including 4.0.5x, which is what many machines are running still. I
> don't know what incompatibilities have been introduced between 1.1 and 2.0
> versions of Inventor. It could be that our subset of nodes has not changed
> between releases.
>
> The first non-SGI port would require quite a bit of work, including file
> readers, graphics display code, lighting calculation code, etc., etc. No
> easy feat!
>
> John B.
>
>
>
> -------------------------
>
> John Barrus barrus@merl.com
>
> Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories 617.621.7535 (VOICE)
> 201 Broadway 617.621.7550 (FAX)
> Cambridge, MA 02139
>
>-- End of excerpt from John W. Barrus