I now have my own Utah teapot!
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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.
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #utah
@thalia One of my favorite art pieces returns the Utah teapot to a different kind of physicality:
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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.
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #utah
@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.
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #utah
@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.
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #utah
@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.
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #unix #utah
@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 :).
