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Pixar Inc.

// Created: Unknown

The Walt Disney Company
Walt Disney Studios
Pixar Animation Studios
Pixar Inc. - 1988, 1995, 2010

I interviewed onsite at Pixar in the spring of 1988 at their office in Novato California. This was prior to the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and the Embarcadero Freeway (I-480) was still in use on the San Francisco waterfront.

Pixar had been acquired a year or so earlier by Steve Jobs for $10-million. I was invited to the interview process by Tony Apodaca, the technology lead for their animation efforts, and the principal architect of Render-Man. At the time of my interview, I understood that the animation team was John Lasseter, Bill Reeves, and Tony.

Because of my acquaintance with Tony via our mutual time in the computer graphics lab at RPI, I initially thought I was being brought in to interview for a spot on the animation technology team. When I arrived at the office for my interview, I met with Micky Mantle, who introduced himself as the head of engineering for Pixar. Micky had other ideas for my skills, more along the hardware development lines, and had me interview with Tony and then a number of hardware designers and low-level software designers.

What they read me in on during that interview was remarkable, and out of view of the general public given their prior history with "Luxo Junior" at SigGraph-1986, and the fact that the company started as the graphics division of LucasFilm with George Lucas of Star Wars fame.

Among the things I got to see during the interview were: (1) some pre-release "beta" version of the Next Computer (from one of Steve Jobs other companies), (2) a pre-release of the short film "Tin Toy", and (3) prototypes of some custom hardware for "image stitching."

The image stitching project was clearly on a high profile trajectory for an unnamed government agency involved in reconnaissance, with Hughes Aircraft Company's aerospace group as the prime contractor. The project, essentially, was to take thousands of black and white satellite photos and "stitch" them together by finding common details on multiple images, then scaling, translating, and rotating those images to create ever larger unified images of ground-based objects.

One of the things that was clear to me at the time is that the images were of much high resolution than anything previous published by the scientific community, in that I could see individual fingers on the hands of people, and I could see plainly the two claws on a claw hammer. (I would guess sub-centimeter resolution, at a time in history that the best resolution "known" to the general public was perhaps 3-meter resolution.) This high resolution corresponded my mind with the numerous duplicate "Hubble Telescope" mirrors known to me through my friends at Perkin-Elmer. Imagine the Hubble Telescope pointed down at the ground. It was not until the late 2010s that the US National Reconnaissance Office admitted to having nearly a dozen Hubble-class telescopes looking downward.

The technical challenge being faced by Pixar at the time, the one they wanted my help on, was converting the fundamental stitching algorithms to VLSI chipsets that could run 1000's of times faster than the Motorola CISC chips in their server farm.

Another fact from the interview that stuck in my mind is that one of the team members commuted from Carmel to Novato (about 90 miles each way) for a full round-trip every single day.

I went home from the interview imagining what could be.

  1. Tin Toy, released in July of 1988 went on to receive an Academy Award.
  2. I crossed paths with Pixar again in 1995 when my QuickTime team worked with them on post-production for Toy Story (the movie), and some difficult tech support for their CD-ROM game version of Toy Story.
  3. even later, I crossed paths with Pixar again in 2010 when I was brought in for an architectural overview of their storage management in their new render-farm in Glendale at Disney Studios.
  4. I met up with Micky Mantle again when I was at Apple, and he had moved into a position as VP of Engineering for Broderbund, the game company that produced "MyST" -- his team was instrumental in helping my debugging and requirements gathering for the QuickTime for Windows and QTML framework.