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There's a story that I still haven't been able to make work in ten years or so of mulling around, but it occurred to me a week or so ago that there's a scene in it that might be able to work as a standalone.
The premise there is that a young teen geek girl, about 13 -- the kind who wins science club competitions -- has a single mother who's a freelance designer, so the girl has access to a mini-mainframe computer, color screen and photo-quality printing capability, and 3D CAD software.
She proceeds to work with the CAD animation program, the age-progression software used for kidnapped kids on milk cartons, full-body images from various sources (mostly scanned newspaper and catalog ads) and something resembling the instant-makeover software that was available for PCs back then, and comes up with something that can project what she and her female friends are likely to look like over the next several years: as high school cheerleaders and athletes, in swimsuits, a sweet 16 party, senior prom night, in bridal gowns. She's only worked out the body progression for girls, though, and there's this photo of her best friend's ten-year old brother wearing a Speedo-type swimsuit at a city meet that she can't resist processing...
Anyway, does this make any real-world technological sense, and if so, where on, say, a mid-80s to mid-90s continuum would it fit?
Best, Eric
Since it borders on Science Fiction...
I really doesn't matter, however the kind of software you describe is newer type stuff, I'd say somewhere in the 90s after Bill Gates did the windows thing.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
ECADD
Was practically unheard of outside of autocadds research labs in the mid 80s and what was available was massively expensive.
But with some many parallel worlds out the why try to fit it in. Just include a few anomolies like president clinton and her first husband and the advent of fusion powered military vehicles. Or whatever !!!!
I'd say early 90s. Do not aim
I'd say early 90s. Do not aim for PCs, they weren't good at the time, aim for machines like NeXTstation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation) or SGI machines.
Color inkjets appeared at approximately the same time, but photo quality ones - a bit later, like late 90s.
It is technically feasible, but it would not have been a fast process, unless some very specific hardware/software was involved. (like some massively parallel machines, there were some at the specified time).
Late 1980's to early 1990's.
Cray had mini-machines that were deskside/tower styled machines, that would fit your mini-mainframe idea. The Tektronics Phaser color wax transfer printers were around, used for pre-press color checking, and decent quality output. The science of age progression depiction has been around for decades, but usually done by artists on sketch pads, not inside computers.