I had setup the animation and kicked off the renderer expecting to come back to work the following day to see all my frames done and ready to be assembled into the movie, which would be written to a few VHS tapes for overnight transport to the show floor.

I go home, life is good, sleep, awake, show up at work, and oh shit!

The renderer script had died a few hundred frames in, meaning I was screwed.

I was doing this work on SGI IRIX, which was a futuristic OS at the time. I was about to experience just what X11 can do!

Some quick math told me the movie could still be done! But, I was going to need to render on damn near every machine in the building.

No problem. One of the managers mooched some temporary render licenses meaning I was set! All I had to do was install the software on the machines, hand each of them a bunch of frames, kick it all off and build the movie as the data gets computed.

I did the whole thing from my desk using X11 to run applications, including the amazing SGI software manager, and setup the renders.

At one point, I had windows open to about 10 machines and each of them was in various stages of software installation too. Some could take the package, others needed space to be free, still others had a dependency, and on it goes.

I pushed all the boxes hard, even rendering on some other users machines without them even knowing!

For 6 hours straight, X11 and I pushed software around, moved render frames to my primary machine, assembled bits into the movie and inch, by inch it got done.

Our sysadmin came by to tell me he had never seen system loads hit these levels. I had many of the machines buried doing frames as fast as they could.

On that day, X11 and a fine UNIX with great tools shined! Got the movie done and written to tape just an hour before the transport person would not make it overseas to the show.

That was multiuser graphical computing in action.

I had been learning UNIX under high pressure to give it up and go all Windows. After that experience, no way. Not gonna happen.

These days I still use Linux everywhere I can. And one last thing:

X11 works great. Being able to remote display is powerful. I was very impressed when I used X to render on a user box, or few.

At any given time, I have forgotten some UNIX, but what I remember always gets me through whatever challenge of the day is.

Go X11! Multi user graphical computing can be amazingly powerful. Would be a shame to lose out on that capability.