CompuServe Messages

Due to some wild rumors and speculation about our motivations for moving to NT, I just thought that I'd give you another piece of information about the Yost Group's history regarding this decision. Two years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine at Wavefront, Dr. Don Brittain (their VP of Technology & Development from 1985->) about future operating systems. Don and I were "trade show buddies" and since Don was a big 3DS fan (and one of the few folks interested in PC's at Wavefront) we had a lot in common. In this particular conversation, Don told me that he was planning on leaving Wavefront because they weren't interested in porting their Advanced Visualizer over to NT. He told me that he'd done a very thorough technical analysis of NT's system services and architecture, and felt that it would be a BETTER platform than Unix for what Wavefront wanted to do in the future. Upper management, however, decided that they didn't want to get involved in the PC market in any way, shape or form. At this point, our conversation got pretty interesting, because I was also looking at different operating systems. It was October 1992, and I was EXTREMELY frustrated with DOS, Phar Lap, etc. I shared this with Don, and we began a running dialog over the next few months about all of the issues relating to doing 3D software development on various operating systems. Eventually, in December, we decided that it would be a good idea for him to fly up to San Francisco for a meeting with my group about whether or not he'd be up for jumping ship from Wavefront to the Yost Group. He came up here in the first week of January, and we all hit it off right away. His 7 years of experience running the Wavefront development group gave him an overview of the highly-complex system architecture that we needed, and we made him an offer to come in as a full partner in the Yost Group that week. Don accepted the offer and started life anew with the Yost Group on February 1, 1993. He spent all of 1993 doing prototypes and OS research, and every single thing we discovered along the way made us even MORE enthusiastic about NT. I normally wouldn't be sharing all of this history with you, but there are a couple of disgruntled folks on the forum who think that we were somehow Shanghai'd to develop for NT. NOT TRUE. This was a very big decision for us, and we went into it carefully and deliberately. I'm more excited about the possibilities for what we can do under NT than I EVER was about DOS, and if you're into 3DS, you've got a lot to look forward to over the next five years. – G