Word: pixar
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Dates: during 1986-1986
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...ordinary high-tech start-up, Pixar stems from Filmmaker George Lucas' special-effects laboratory and boasts two of the best-known names in computer graphics, Edwin Catmull, 41, and Alvy Ray Smith, 42. Controlling interest in the company was purchased in February by Steven Jobs, the co-founder and former chairman of Apple Computer...
...pixel, on the screen must be mathematically specified. One frame of 35-mm film can require more than 6 million pixels; a 60-second sequence can cost $300,000 and take months to complete. To speed up the process, Catmull and Smith built a special-purpose machine -- the Pixar -- that divides the computational task among four parallel processors: three to control the red, blue or green washed onto each pixel; one to control the pixel's transparency...
...business," he said earlier this year. "It's just too time consuming and expensive." Enter Jobs, who, after leaving Apple last year with $85 million worth of the company's stock, had both money and time on his hands. He saw that the Pixar computer had applications far beyond the film business. He also thought he could teach Catmull and Smith something. "They're babes in the woods," says Jobs, 31. "I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen." Today Jobs divides his time between Next Inc., where he is developing desktop computers for scientists and engineers...
Jobs' ministrations seem to be paying off. In the past few months the company has signed deals with four computer manufacturers to repackage the $122,000 Pixar machine for sale in a variety of markets: to doctors for reading CAT scans, to engineers for computer-aided design, to oil companies for analyzing seismic soundings, to defense contractors for interpreting data beamed from orbiting spy satellites. Pixar officials estimate that eventually more than 90% of the company's business will come from outside the entertainment industry...
Nonetheless, it is in the creation of high-quality computer images that Pixar's talent really shines. To create the ocean waves shown in Dallas, Programmer Bill Reeves resurrected a mathematical model, first formulated in the 19th century, of the elliptical movement of water molecules. The results are striking. Says Reeves: "So far, this is the most accurate computer- generated se- quence that demonstrates the interaction between waves and the beach...