History

Back in 1996, my office was in the lower level of the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University.  In the office next to me sat Doug Kelly, a systems librarian. I was working as a multimedia developer and he had a background in computer graphics.

One day Doug told me that he was going to 'the' computer graphics conference - SIGGRAPH in New Orleans and asked  if I wanted to tag along. I asked my boss for the week off work, $50 for the show floor , and part of the gas and condo money.  He said that driving took too long and instead offered not only to fly me, but to fly Doug down as well.

The conference was amazing, the people, the technology, the Newtek party on the Riverboat, the Apple party in the Mardi Graw float storage.  I learned a lot too. When I got back I briefed my boss on all of the technology, techniques, and show discounts.

In 1997 Doug told me that SIGGRAPH was going to be in Los Angeles and would be even bigger and better than New Orleans.  I had an early digital camera and brought it along to show everyone back home what the conference was like. The pictures were a big hit and I gave my SIGGRAPH slide show again and again.  I was really surprised at how many people who were at the show asked me to send them the pictures.

In 1998 Doug left the university to write computer books full-time (Character Animation in Depth, Digital Compositing in Depth).  Before I left for SIGGRAPH in Orlando, I setup my office PowerMac as a web server to nightly post my SIGGRAPH pictures and notes the hotel. "Live From SIGGRAPH" was born. At first I only told Doug, my boss, and some friends but when Doug posted the URL to the CG-Char list, all hell broke loose and the server went down due to the overload in traffic. And as soon as we rebooted it - it went down again! (Remember this was 1998) Over the years I had to shuffle around the location of the site from one server to the next just to keep it running but now we are nice and stable! What was most exciting was that even from the start people at the conference would come up to me and ask me about things they had seen posted on my site just the night before!

The pictures, captions, and stories form a "Live" report on that year's conference and the archives are a running history of SIGGRAPH experiences.

It has been my pleasure to be bring you this site and I hope to continue it for years to come!