:) great! thanks for sharing...

i remember old memories...

Thanks for the "old school" video. And, more importantly, thanks for helping to define Architectural Visualization.

Wow... Seems like years gone so fast. Can you please upload the video 3D Studio DOS r4 version, also?
We were all shocked with the Gouraud shading at that time. Thank you for all... :) Cheers...

Thanks for putting this together Tom. I worked on 3D Studio in the early nineties, but have forgotten much of how the program worked or looked like. This brought back a lot of memories. How many was there in the development team of the first 3D Studio?

showing the very first (Amiga's) version will be nice.

Rune, there were three people in the original 3DS development group -- Gary Yost, the team leader; Jack Powell, who wrote the product manuals, animated and made sure everything we did was consistent; and me writing the code. Jim Kent, who created Autodesk Animator, was originally slated to write the keyframer but opted out and we ended up bringing in Dan Silva in late 1989 to do that. Funny bit of trivia: Dan wrote Deluxe Paint for the Amiga; I wrote the DEGAS paint program for the Atari ST. Dan is one extremely talented and nice guy; he and I worked really well together over the four releases of 3DS DOS and into the Max era.

@Pinate -- Actually, we never had an Amiga version. We started out with CAD-3D on the Atari ST, then migrated to the PC. And you oughta see the prototype that led to the CAD-3D project. I actually have it here and can run it on the ST emulator -- I originally coded it up in October of 1985, and it bears no resemblance to CAD-3D! If Gary Yost sees it, he'll probably have some sort of horrible flashbacks! :-) I'll try recording a video of that tomorrow!

Thanks for the vid, I didn't start learning max for another 10 years after it's first release but it is nice to see where it all started.

Also your site is pretty informative too - keep up the good work!

I love max, use it every day at work and at home.

But It's a shame the pile of stuff it had become. I think sooner or later It's gonna be needed to restart all over again, with a fresh program with 21 century code! :P

awesome. I only got into 3ds in 98...

I started on the version 5.1, and it was my most exciting gift on that year. Thanks Tom Hudson.

Great stuff! I am asking myself if things changed so much for the past 20 years, what's going to be in next 20 years?

Amazing!!! Please, Tom. Post more videos like that. I'm writing about the history of 3d studio. You are the man behind all. Thanks!

Thanks for this trip down memory lane Tom!
I was a CAD Draftsman working at Autodesk UK as Technical Writer in the late 80's.
The writers from many of the main European offices were flown to Sausalito (when Adesk was at Marinship Way) so we could work at head office for a simultaneous worldwide release of AutoCAD.
One of the writers introduced me to Gary on a chance encounter in the hallway & we later chatted about comics, animation & graphics at a beer bash. Little did I know that was the beginning of a new chapter in my life!
Grant Blaha gave me a copy of THUD to take back to the London office, test & email Gary feedback over the nascent Compuserve forum. At first I didn't get it... it had aspects of AutoCAD & AutoShade (remember the Renderman link?!) but it wasn't clear how versatile & powerful 3D Studio would become.
It's great to look back at the genesis of this program which has kept me gainfully employed for over 2 decades :)

Wow. Thank you. My first experience with 3D Studio was in highschool in the mid-90's. I desperately wanted to run it on my 386, but with no floating point memory and something liked 4 megs of ram there was just no way. So much for a $2000 computer in early 1993.

Speaking of loses of early files (from the other video you have), my father threw out the old 386 without asking, including the 120 meg harddrive I had, losing a big component of my teenagehood.

Oooh! Holy crap. Just got to the end. DOS extender is a term I haven't heard in a long time. DOS4GW? Is that what I'm thinking? :)

hi! where i can download 3D studio for dos ?

Using 3ds for the first time was the Max version and this was unique... Thank you for sharing this, the touching foreword in the Advanced to Expert 3DATS book and making all of us able to create and make a living from your vision.

old history....