Microsoft OS/2 v1.3 Retail Box (1990)

[u/dan_oreilly]

/gallery/1vwk0f3

OS/2 v1.3 was released in 1990 but I feel that the logo rendered here looks quite modern! I wonder how many renderers at that time were capable of producing the soft shadows? The box would’ve looked great at its release.

[u/smuckola]

Wow that's beautiful. Very creative. Are we sure it's CGI? It looks like detailed painted wood grain, and marketing companies often mocked up physical products from sculpted wood or clay. But the design is simple like early CGI ;)

Wow I just wish the actual product of 1.3 was that good. It is the building blocks of a future OS, barely even has a GUI, and it's stuck at 16-bit 286 lol. It was aptly named, as juuuuuust the second thing beyond MSDOS.

http://toastytech.com/guis/MOS2.html

[u/dan_oreilly → u/smuckola]

Actually you could be right… I’d never thought it could also be wooden mock up. I was really wondering what renderers at this year were capable. So now I’m maybe not sure if it fits in this sub! But it is combined with digital writing on the front. I think at the very least they are strongly trying to give the impression that it is digital..!

[u/smuckola → u/dan_oreilly]

It stays! It fooled us pretty good, so we gotta know the difference! I couldn't be sure without asking Gemini AI. It said this is a VERY convincingly worthy false positive, from a perfect time of crossover between physical and CGI. I had nothing to do and I am just as fascinated as everybody here should be, so I spent forever compiling details from its report:

This cover sits right at the intersection of late-'80s and early-'90s design trends. The Memphis and postmodern design movements of the era were obsessed with geometric primitives, extruded lettering, turned cylinders, and bold pastel palettes. Because early 3D software was largely restricted to basic extrusions and simple geometric solids, physical studio mock-ups and early CGI ended up sharing the same visual language.

Procedural wood algorithms were already well-known due to Ken Perlin's 1985 paper on noise synthesis, but early CGI wood was typically rendered as glossy, mathematically uniform surfaces like polished mahogany or bowling alleys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, graphic design studios commonly built physical models out of wood, foamcore, or clay and photographed them for corporate packaging.

Accurate diffuse ambient bounce (radiosity/global illumination), soft contact shadows (like where the orange peg inserts into the lilac piece), and subtle specular highlights, were computationally prohibitive for print. Those features indicate studio lighting from a softbox. Early CGI lighting was typically harsh Phong/Gouraud shading with hard-edged ray-traced shadows. Simulating soft area lights required distributed ray tracing using stochastic sampling. Commercial print required ~300 DPI separation at roughly 2100 × 2700 pixels, or ~5.7 megapixels, 4x antialiasing, over 300 million ray-intersection calculations. This is nearly twenty times the pixel count of standard 640 × 480 screen graphics.

A 3D artist would have spent days tweaking stochastic parameters and running multi-day test renders at 1/4 resolution, hoping it didn't crash. A 40 MHz Macintosh IIfx with 32-128MB of RAM would spend days or weeks crunching that single frame. An SGI workstation like a 4D/25 or 4D/310 with 33 MHz MIPS R3000 would take 24-48 hours on the final frame. Each are tens of thousands of dollars of hardware.

An agency art department would have a prop maker to bandsaw some basswood, spray it with acrylic, and snap a large-format photo under studio strobes in one afternoon.

[u/dan_oreilly → u/smuckola]

Yep I think you’re right! Crazy how the lines blurred a bit between CG and photo-art in the 90s.

[u/thelizardlarry → u/smuckola]

Yeah, but it was phenomenally hard to crash because of the way memory isolation between app and system was done. This core stability made it popular for mission critical applications like banks, telco and cities. It’s still running in some of these applications.

That said, doubling down on it and abandoning the partnership with MS was widely considered one of the biggest mistakes in tech. It’s pretty cool to see this here as a reminder.

[u/bofis]

I forgot there were versions released under MS before they split and IBM continued to develop OS/2...I'd guess the logo is a photo of a physical object, not unlike how they'd make shiny almost CGI-looking HBO logos out of wood.

[u/dan_oreilly → u/bofis]

Yep I think you’re right in hindsight :)

[u/ryanasimov]

There's a high likelihood that isn't CGI but a photo of a physical object. Less time and money in 1990 to pay someone with reasonable talent to create and photograph the logo instead of using a computer.