My first encounter with computer graphics was at a CAD course at my university. A CAD program was running on the state of the art "mini computer" (anyone remember that term?) of the time, a Digital Equipment VAX 785. At that time these machines were so hot that they had export restrictions due to their military significance (They were among other things used on nuclear submarines). The one at my university was the first one installed in Sweden. About 20 people could work simultaneously with a CAD application on that machine without any performance problems. I have been told that the computing power of a VAX 785 at that time can be compared to something in between an Intel 386 and 486 processor... Sometimes I wonder where all the computing power in our modern machines is wasted, since we were able to do quite advanced stuff in the old days with pretty simple processors...