I now have my own Utah teapot!
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia Where is the Mandrill?
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia Maybe the Sutherland VW still exists? IIRC that was done by students crawling over the body with measuring instruments and tape.
I met Ivan Sutherland a couple of times when ballroom dancing in Palo Alto back in the 80s. Slightly starstruck I asked if he was the founder-of-CG Ivan Sutherland and he laughed "No, I'm the Ivan Sutherland who likes dancing". TAed for Jim Blinn's graphics course at Caltech; glad to see he finally swapped out that green sweater.
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A quick, preliminary analysis of the disk image before sharing showed it was a unique snapshot, earlier than V5. We could see Hunt the Wumpus, SNOBOL, and an older version of cc. Then within hours of my tape image upload to the Internet Archive, Angelo Papenhoff (@aap) produced a working SIMH emulation setup and published instructions. Within days, Jacob Ritorto had booted it on a real PDP-11/45 and Ashlin Inwood on a PDP-11/40, the two officially supported machines. And I visited the Interim Computer Machine to attempt booting on their "misspiggy" PDP-11/70, but more repairs were needed.
As a historical artifact, the UNIX V4 tape fills in a midpoint of a 19-month gap in UNIX source code. It was shortly after the kernel was rewritten from assembly into C and was rapidly growing into a system we recognize today. And at the University of Utah, it adds a connection in a history of pioneering computer science research, and I'm happy to have been involved.
Photo: UNIX V4 tape with a PDP-11/20 and UNIX V1 manual at the Computer History Museum, held by Jon Duerig and Thalia Archibald, 2025-12-19.
@thalia @aap @icm Where did you get it from? The factory which made them burned down a few years ago and to my knowledge this model of teapot has not been made since https://www.kreiszeitung.de/lokales/niedersachsen/grossbrand-rauch-varel-sieben-hallen-von-porzellanfabrik-in-vollbrand-video-zeigt-flammenmeer-92373560.html
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@thalia ooh, where did you get it from? aiui those melitta teapots were made by friesland porzellan https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/47320.html but sadly they had a fire in 2023 which destroyed all their patterns and they can no longer make any more https://friesland-porzellan.de/produkte/information
@fanf I've been checking eBay every day for months.
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@dougmerritt I'm still looking for a Blinn-ratio Utah teapot, that they produced for a short while!
@thalia @dougmerritt Sadly the factory had a fire & they lost many of their pottery molds, including the Utah teapot ones
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@thalia @dougmerritt Sadly the factory had a fire & they lost many of their pottery molds, including the Utah teapot ones
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@fanf I've been checking eBay every day for months.
@thalia aha, true dedication
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia One of my favorite art pieces returns the Utah teapot to a different kind of physicality:
Grafikdemo
Grafikdemo is a sculpture which I have made in 2004. It is a wireframe model of a teapot mounted inside a Commodore CBM cabinet. The model can be rotated in two axis by pushing keys on the keyboard. There is no control electronics involved, just some relays which switch the motors to move the model. http://www.niklasroy.com/project/32/grafikdemo
Vimeo (vimeo.com)
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia Thank you so much for this thread! My fiancée took me to the Computer History Museum a while back and I had to explain to her why I was so excited about a teapot.
That explanation started as "This is THE teapot!" and she very patiently asked questions to help me explain it to her.
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While working on his 1975 dissertation on procedural modeling at the University of Utah, Martin Newell needed a good test object and, at the suggestion of his wife, picked their Melitta tea set. He measured it by hand and created a model rendered with Bézier curves, one of the first to be modeled as rules instead of a set of points.
Shortly thereafter, Jim Blinn refined the model. While doing a demo, he shrunk the model vertically by a third, but everyone liked it better that way, so it stuck. His 1977 publication with Martin on texture and reflection applied several fun textures to the teapot and from there its popularity spread.
Photo: UNIX V4 tape with the original Utah teapot at the Computer History Museum, held by Jon Duerig and Thalia Archibald, 2025-12-19.
@thalia All the versions and improvements are visible at https://graphics.cs.utah.edu/teapot/
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia our Utah teapot prefers resting on diffuse mirrored surfaces
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I now have my own Utah teapot!
This ordinary teapot is the "hello world" object of computer graphics and has cameos in countless productions.
A thread on teapots and UNIX… 🧵
Photo: My Melitta teapot, 2026-04-16.
@thalia Did you get Martin to sign your teapot?
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@thalia Did you get Martin to sign your teapot?
@moelassus Not yet. But hopefully I'll meet him and others when I speak on UNIX V4 at SIGGRAPH this summer! I'm bringing my teapot :).
