Oh, but the original version of Blender was truly dreadful. It wasn’t until the “complete user-interface makeover” that Blender truly began to hit its stride, and of course it hasn’t slowed down since.
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Hum, Lightwave is still very powerful , at least you can do proper stress maps unlike cycles : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYJRVUDuZvo
Animation master can still do couple things the other software’s cannot without xtra code or scripting.
Blender… used to like fit on floppy disk. I saw it as I had installed it on 486 and of I go to Border’s book store and pick up a Book on it and sit for two hours. And before get in deep thinking how such small program can do so much. And now it has expanded in what it can do to keep up with effects and rendering. But in the end the simulations, python interaction, you can do like multivertex faces… Actually there is quite a lot of new stuff. But still the way blender is superior in the very basic ways of constructing models compared to all the programs out there, I would say, thats why i didnt move to houdini, maya or 3dmax
Can you show that original version ? I want to have a laugh 
Hehe, here you are: http://download.blender.org/release/Blender1.60/
Cheers, mib
Edit:Iirc the first Windows version, earlier are for IRIX, running on Linux with WINE.
Wow, Retro…what is that big sequence button ?
Oooooooooooooo
That’s the eject button if you panic and want to learn Max instead.
Speaking of feeling sorry. I have a friend who still uses something called ‘Misfit 3d’ - sort of like an opensource milkshape, but it dosen’t appear to be quite as capable 
I’ve been trying to persuade him to join the 21st Century for years. He thinks that he has ‘learned enough in his life’ and won’t budge. Sigh. He can’t (wont) get his head around Blender. At this point, I’ve even steered him towards student versions of either Max or Maya!
I cut my 3d teeth on an Amiga using imagine 3d… cow anyone…
considering it was 12 megahertz with like a meg of ram, it didnt do to badly.
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This thread was bumped, so I will place this here.
To Newtek’s credit, they continue to put out patch releases for their 2018 version. It sounds nice, or so you think…
https://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?158406-LightWave-3D�-2018-0-7-Available-Now
This really gives the impression that NewTek simply does not have the resources to keep the app. relevant as two of these 7 changes is just changing numbers. The Blender devs. meanwhile can pump out a crazy number of fixes in the space of a day.
Though at this point, Lightwave’s userbase will welcome any development of their favorite app. even though the rate of development is very light overall (with the exception of maybe some big new feature to headline a new release).
I think Lightwave is long gone by now.
I really REALLY wanted to learn lightwave back then because of Jimmy Neutron.
They even shipped a free trial version to me [Jimmy Neutron Era], I am grateful to that sign of good gesture and I will always love them for it.
I still don’t mind learning it for nostalgia.
I think NewTek abandoned their development of a modern app (CORE) because they feared it would tick off the top-tier users of LW… now I doubt there are many of those folks left, and more moving to something else each day.
Some classic stuff here. I got my start with Bryce 4, which was back in the Corel days before Daz got it. The guys that made Bryce were kind of 3D programming gurus that still have their names on various fractals and rendering methods even now. The “happy/fun” toy-like UI kind of belied the decent ray tracing engine it had underpinning it back at the time when it was new. (Not only that, it was inexpensive compared to other rendering software at the time. Currently Bryce is free now, but severely outdated.) It didn’t do mesh modeling, but could import .obj. So a lot of stuff meant doing a combo of it and Anim8or or Wings3D, and just using Bryce as the render engine. Then pushing the shiny red button and waiting and waiting for it to do its thing.
Later on I moved over to Carrara, as Bryce was getting old and other renderers were more capable and faster. Didn’t come over to Blender until 2.68, which was some time after the 2.5 update. I tried Blender two or three times prior, but couldn’t get past the default cube with the way the pre-2.5 UI was. The relatively new (at the time) Cycles render engine is what drew me in then, but that UI change was certainly a help at keeping me around.
Also I remember there being tropes/memes with some software too. “Floating sphere over water” was the classic Bryce one. And “Naked Vicky in a Castle With a Sword” was a Poser/Daz3D thing.
This bring back memories, it has even the same layer system than 2.79 , didn’t it ?
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thanks all… great going down memory lane. Still have LightWave with dongle ver 11 on main computer with older modo, never open it these days. Purchased Truespace (Caligary) and lots to go with it, finally made a short animation of a logo for web… it was over 300 mb. Never used true space again; Silo was my modeling tool until move to blender. Still have last version of Silo on main computer. Loved the feel of working vertices in it’s lovely interface. Can not render, have to use other SW.
Thanks all for lovely return trip down memory lane. Now…back to more great times in Blender today.
Ton and developers are like modern day heroic “god” like figures in roman and greek mythology times. The users are the mortals using the strength from the “gods”. [god spelled backward = “dog”, just a reminder, not comment].
thanks all
Yes, from what i remember. It was those little square buttons up there at the top.
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TBH, I think what hurt those beautiful $99-$999 was piracy. Not that people pirated their program, but that people pirated 3Ds Max, Maya and/or Softimage. Many of those pirates would never have sprung for software with a four digit price tag, but would have instead spent $199 on something like Raydream or Real3D instead.