During the Pandemic I started a Blender related channel, and my biggest success by far was some digital archeology I did.
Blender 2.8 had come out and it made some much needed major improvements to Blender, and it really injected life into the platform. Not only did 2.8 bring much needed quality of life features, but it also made it easier for beginners. Of course it's still a complex package like it's commercial peers, so there will always be a learning curve, but it 2.8 was a great step. Since then, Blender has been making leaps & bounds with so much improvement it's hard to keep up with.
But enough about the future - when 2.8 came out I was proud of Blender and really excited about it. Something made me curious to check out the older versions of Blender. For reference, I started in the 1.X series when it still fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk. But I wanted the full perspective to appreciate just how far Blender had come from 1.0 to 2.8.
To my surprise, I found out that the first version of Blender was only available on Irix systems. Irix was the operating system of Silicon Graphics machines - the same company that worked with Nintendo on the 64 to make the reality processor, as well as infamously worked on early CG Hollywood. Before the modern programmable GPU, Silicon Graphics were THE machines to use for 3D graphics. Blender was built for their unix-clone, called Irix.
I found out it was possible to get MAME to run an Irix machine, but could I install Blender on it?
The Blender Foundation actually hosts every version of Blender ever made available for download, so I got the Irix zip, booted up a Mame Irix machine & copied it over. It didn't work.
I poked around, but just couldn't figure it out. It looked like it was missing some files despite being the official upload from Blender.
I noticed that some of the newer versions of Blender had those same files, so I could probably copy them, but where to put them? It wasn't clear where it was looking. I tried the usual suspects: same directory, home directory, etc. But nothing worked.
I ended up making a multi-part YouTube series and some of the comments came to the rescue - they helped me figure out where to put the files, and sure enough - it worked. The files were a mismatch, but the program launched!
Eventually I reached out to Ton Rosdendaal, the founder of Blender. He not only updated the official download with the correct files, but shouted me out on Twitter:
So in the end I was one of the first people - likely in decades - to actually get the first version of Blender to run. Especially so, since the official upload had missing files, and nobody had asked for them the entire time.
Below is the series of YouTube videos, so you can follow the whole story in detail, as well as see what Blender 1.0 was like!