Oh the things you’ll find…
I’m cleaning up a bunch of archived files.
While I was in grad school, after Pixar, I did a little bit of consulting to make ends meet. One of the more fun things that I did was write a bunch of audio software for a David Bowie interactive CD. (aka CDi)
I got to hang out with Brian Eno, visited him on Guy Fawkes Night while I happened to be in the UK (His neighbors really liked him, he’s a nice guy.)
Somehow, I seem to have come upon the code for one of the things I wrote –
I have a DAT with Black Tie / White Noise tracks. You could remix Bowie in real time. Man that was fun.
Amazingly, you can still buy a used version on Amazon – https://amzn.to/3x441Nn
Harsh review :)
MacRenderMan
Some historical floppy disk fun from old Pixar days.
When Pixar decided to sell RenderMan to the public we had to come up with a good name (It was REYES, Renders Everything You’ve Ever Saw / Seen). You could already buy a version that a ran on the Pixar Image Computer CHAP (Channel Processor) called CHAPREYES. I don’t know if we ever sold any, but we did render Red’s Dream on it, in part.
The internal code name was RenderMan. Jeff Mock and JL designed some ‘Superman Logo’ shirts and the whole shebang. I wish I still had mine. It went to the car-wash bucket a long time ago, along with my original Surf Ohio shirt.
We had a contest to name the new product but RenderMan won. So that’s what you’ve got. It ran pretty slow on the Macintosh of the time, but it ran. There was no UI (You had to buy ShowPlace which was a sort of Adobe Dimension of its time) but I wrote an interface to Mathematica so I could render things for my dissertation work.
When Pat Hanrahan sent out the original RIP specification this wonderful note came back –
Trivia Note! It was originally RenderMan Interface Protocol, and the files were .rip files, but Adobe was starting to do that PostScript thing for Raster Image Processor files, so we changed to RenderMan Interface Bytestream or .rib.
Also, it got a nice IEEE award 30+ years later, so always play the long game, folks.
Above, the original RenderMan ‘bouncing r’ logo as a pin. Mint in package, well, mouse-eaten package.
Chernobyl Personal Geiger Counter
Issued to residents of Chernobyl and surrounding areas after the Chernobyl Disaster.
Last I played with it, it still worked. It takes some pretty weird batteries and I think a coil has cracked inside, so I need to do a little renovation work on it.
I got it from a gemologist friend. And I am sticking to that story.
If you’re interested in some interior photos, let me know. I’ll grab some when I take it apart to fix the coil.
On Talks and Slides
Some history of style.
Once upon a time, Ed Tufte called me a “sanctimonious assohole”. I suggested that he up the dosage of his medications and stopped recommending his books to my students and colleagues1. But — The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint remains a pretty good essay (sometimes excessive) on some of its ills.
I grew up in a Kodak Slide Carousel era of presentations. Every ‘big’ talk I went to as an undergrad was formatted that way – Ektachrome 35mm slides. Usually of images — text was actually difficult to put on them, you needed a copy stand or a slide printing rig2. Now you just type words and, boom, you’re done. Add some clip art of puppies or maybe some insane typographical effects and you get the sort of talk everyone loves to hate.
At Pixar, we had a text generating system for the Image Computer. It was based on the fonts that Don Knuth had put together (Metafont) and a version of roff/nroff/troff by Tom Porter, if I’m remembering right. Here’s one from a talk I gave in London in 1989 —
Why that title? We sat around and decided to call ourselves, the animation group, “Studio Pixar” to identify as a different group than was making hardware and software. It sounds a little silly in retrospect, but hey, we weren’t in branding, just goofiness. That image rendered on the Pixar Image Computer and was then transferred to Ektachrome or 5247 using the Pixar Laser Scanner3, processed and mounted.
In those early days, a subset of Eben, Pete, Andrew and I used to go to places (usually colleges, usually Berkeley and Stanford) to show our films and talk about how we did things. This was all new stuff then, people wanted to know how we did it. Before one adventure, Pete decided to make some title and word slides that were more visually interesting to go with our more visually interesting content. I drew a few too, but Pete’s were the majority of the talk —
I found them a while back. I love them so much —
This was a nice vacation from these —
Anyway, someone was asking why I use so few words on my talk slides. I use a lot of (simplified) graphs and a lot of photos. I personally think it helps with the storytelling — to not have people reading lists of words, tables of numbers, &c. I loved the beamer LaTeX class back in my dissertation days — my slides were literally part of the document I created. Knuth’s Literate Programming, from which the Mathematica Notebook4 took inspiration, was also an important of my presentation upbringing. One document, code, paper and talk slides, all in one. It all comes back to Knuth somehow, which I personally think is a good thing. A very thoughtful guy who facilitated a lot of what we use today.
Finally — if you’re looking for a tool to create more thoughtful presentations, have a look at iA Presenter. Markdown driven slide presentation — like Markdown, TeX, and roff, thinking about your *content* rather than which awesome transition and bullet point animation you’re going to use. Highly recommended process.
- At a particular institution I was associated with, I put the kibosh on a plan to retain him as a consultant on visual literacy. I showed the committee the correspondence between him and me and they decided that they didn’t want such a fragile personality involved in the project. It’s the little sanctimonious revenge that warms the cockles of the heart in the wintertime. There was also possibly a bit of pot-kettle going on here I think. Regardless, I hope he’s feeling better these days. ↩︎
- Does anyone else remember the SIGGRAPH where, somehow, Larry Yeager (I think?) didn’t have his slides and made a set of hand-written bullet points, photographed them in his hotel and had them rush processed before his talk? Maybe I’m hallucinating that but I don’t think so. ↩︎
- Another interesting piece of IO hardware, built by David DiFrancisco. ↩︎
- Don’t get me started on some takes on the ‘innovation’ that are Python notebooks. I’m super happy they exist, but they’re not the new crazy thing everyone thinks. ↩︎
The PICS 2000
A medical imaging workstation – the beginning of volume imaging
When I got my interview at Pixar, I was at Ohio State working on volumetric rendering of CT and MR images. There are a few callbacks to that on here, OSU MRI Flashback – 1984 for example. We were at the leading edge of that stuff back then. Pixar was looking for commercial sales of its Pixar Image Computer and volume imaging was a perfect use for a gigantic frame buffer + computer like the Pixar. This used the Pixar II, the second generation, designed to be a little more affordable. (It also implemented what was to be the future of high-res TV standards and other little fun tidbits.) It used a consumer-grade VHS recorder and a modified version of Steve Wozniak’s CL-9 CORE universal remote control. I learned how to write 6502 code for that thing, and wrote a nice little controller library. Bruce Young of our hardware group and I made a few trips down to CL-9 in Los Gatos, learned about this revolutionary-at-the-time device to control multiple devices with a single remote control!
The PICS had a SUN, Pixar II, and a 9-track tape drive + two monitors (one for the Pixar, one for the UI). I was tasked to design the UI. Back then, there wasn’t really much well-established UI/UX practice, so I mainly looked at the Macintosh and MacOS for inspiration. We used a spatial layout, moving ‘tasks’ like reading tape, processing images, outputting renders, from left to right in an inverted-U shape.
We built all sorts of neat tools for segmenting the images (my introduction to Bayesian statistics via Pat Hanrahan) selecting ROIs, etc. It was a really cool device and _way_ ahead of its time alas. I made two trips to RSNA (more good stories there about taxis, young Stephen Colbert @ Scuzi restaurant, a dead man’s Model Railroader, and more!) to help try to get radiologists to think they needed this beast, and, indeed I think we sold a total of six. The industry wasn’t ready for volume rendering. Now, when you pick up a CD from your radiology center, it’s got a volume renderer baked-into the viewer already on the disk.
There was not much in the way of agreed-upon medical imaging networking (for history fans, PACS was just being discussed at various imaging meetings, and wasn’t near being settled work) so you’d take the scan of the patient on 9-track tape and load it into our machine, read, and decode it. I had been doing this at OSU with the GE hardware we had there, and even for my Father-in-law’s pharmacy business, to read 9-track tapes which were the currency of exchange for medical (and, of course, other) data at the time.
I was digging through my archives, moving from house to house, and found the original literature / flier for it. And now, it is yours to enjoy too –
If you ever got to see one of these, or the CL-9 (Cloud-9 alias) CORE or anything else fun like this, let me know.
Listerine Hack
How to drink a few bottles of Listerine, scare your clients, and ultimately see your clients repeat your prank.
I told this story to Penn years ago and he decided it was worthy of a place in their book. There are some great stories in there and I’m proud to have been part of it.
TL;DR – We were making commercials for Listerine, Pete Docter and I gaffed up a ‘hero’ bottle before a client visit. I drank it on a bet, during the meeting, egged on by Pete, JL, Andrew and Craig. I run out of room, feigning I’m about to throw up. Client rep follows and actually gets sick. Client goes back to Listerine and pulls same prank on assembly line to colleagues there.
Note that Pete’s role was minimized in Penn’s writeup and we didn’t really catch it. He was quite instrumental. The film is also “Luxo Jr.” not “Luxor” – a pretty common mistake. Finally, Pixar president Ed Catmull wandered into the restroom where we were mixing up the special bottle, just gave us a nod to say “I didn’t see this.” Copy editing is boring. A lesson for the future.
If you want the book https://amzn.to/3SxU9DX. Here’s a PDF of the story.
You know that thing where you go back and read something really fun from your past, and all those great feelings, memories, and stuff come rushing back making you really happy for a few minutes? Yeah – this is that.
Highland Aire
I just finished a row. It’s about 99% humidity this morning, which, to credit Chris Wedge, reminds me of having just rowed inside someone’s mouth.
Chris and I used to ride our bikes together when we were at CGRG. That was back in my racing days, I was decidedly a mediocre racer1 but I had a lot of fun. That was right when Greg Lemond became the great hope, 7–11 flew the US flag, I met Norman Alvis from that team, Motorola, Postal, and Saturn, who, at 60, is about to try to regain the hour record, which he held for years.
Chris referred to Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays as “Dentist office jazz”. I suppose I respect his opinion and can understand. After all, he lived next door to Kathleen Brenan for a while.
Highland Aire from Lyle Mays just came on random. It reminded me2 of one day back in the late 80’s, I had to go to San Francisco for some reason and, on my way back up to Fairfax, there was a traffic jam on 101 that started at the bridge3. Since I used to ride over Mt. Tam I decided to just take the long, scenic way home.
Right when I hit the Panoramic Highway4 that tune came on. It was, in context, perfect. Pretty much a theme song for that stretch of road.
Which further reminded me — another old friend I miss from those days, Rich McKay, was working on a crew on the Panoramic as AC on a (newly introduced!) Miata commercial. Wilson Burrows, also CGRG / Marin alumni, once told me that, if you watch car commercials, every 3rd or 4th one is shot on that road. I remember having to ride through a shoot once, to the chagrin of the PAs because it was closed for the shoot.
Sorry man, if I was in a car, I’d turn around. But I’m on a bike and I’ve got places to be.
Anyway, the shot was of a wedding party celebrating. There was to be the release of birds and the Miata was to drive through the flock, forced perspective in depth, to give the birds safe clearance, etc. On the first take, apparently one of the birds wasn’t feeling very well and, when released, just sort of flew ‘down and toward’ the car as opposed to ‘up and away’. A greatly unintended collision occurred between the ill bird and the car.
The crew and actors were stunned and depressed. The grill was damaged. Shooting was called off for the day.
And that’s what I think about when I hear Highland Aire.
- I was never going to get out of Cat 3. Ever. ↩︎
- It also reminded me of when I had just discovered Bill Frisell w/ Jan Garbarek, and Stephen Spencer, also CGRG, who I told about. And how we bonded over it ever since. ↩︎
- I realize that is common now, and it happened frequently back then, but not always, like now. ↩︎
- Panoramic, but hardly a highway. ↩︎
Cat Came Back Jeans
Sometime in the late 80’s, I was a guest at a Spike n’ Mike animation festival, Santa Cruz I think. A bunch of us from Pixar went down, JL was probably the only ‘true’ special guest, but somehow I ended up at the autograph table, signing posters and stuff.
I was sitting next to Cordell Barker who had just done the amazing Cat Came Back which was Oscar nominated along with one of our shorts. I loved it, loved the snake scene in the pit in particular. The visual style is beautiful, semi Squigglevision, catchy tune, all that good stuff.
Somehow, we were at the table and just started signing all sorts of stuff, John, my favorite instigator of chaos, said “Hey Cordell, sign Flip’s pants!” So, he did. I think I signed some kid’s Levis, JL signed someone’s arm. Man, we were rock n’ roll stars baby.
I just unboxed some Pixar clothing that now has holes in it, but found the jeans –
I remember staying at the Cliff Crest Inn, which we stayed in dozens of times after. I remember a high speed car ride to an afterparty with JL and Bill Plimpton and Beth and Nancy in the car. Jaron Lanier had set up some media setup at the party. It was a weird scene. John, Nancy, Beth and I went and grabbed some wine somewhere instead.
Anyway – I loved The Cat Came Back. All hail the National Film Board of Canada. If you see Cordell ask him if he still has my signature on whatever I signed.
IMSAI 8080
Back and forth in time…
The IMSAI 8080 was the first “clone” microcomputer, introduced in 1975 – a lower cost version of the MITS Altair 8800, introduced a year earlier in 1974. I first saw the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics. Dad got me a subscription to PE because of my insane interest in taking apart phones and other electronics that he brought home. I was very good at taking things apart, not always putting them back together again, but that didn’t matter.
I was fascinated by pocket calculators, especially the Bowmar Brain and early Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments models. I can probably attribute almost all of this to magazines like Popular Electronics and hanging out at Wholesale Electronics in Portsmouth. I bought my first Sony Walkman there in 1980, using newspaper route savings. Dad was friends with the manager then owner, Pete Saltzman, and Pete used to give me old broken parts, and copies of Consumer Electronics magazine – a trade rag for people who sold, um, consumer electronics.
My first calculator was a hand-me-down from Dad, a four-function thing from National Semiconductor called a “Mathbox“. It was RPN, which I found exotic but loved once I figured out what it did. I bought my first scientific calculator, another National Semiconductor, from Harts Department Store, some time in middle school.
Then I learned about programmable calculators and my brain melted.
My friend, Jim Troutman, had an older brother in engineering school at Ohio State. He gave him a hand-me-down HP-35 non-programmable model, but it led me to learn about the whole HP line, where I discovered that craziness of programming. I became hooked and, my senior year of high school, bought an HP-41that I used all through college (I still have it!). I learned how to program with it, and also the craziness of “synthetic programming” from some fellow geeks at the OSU Interactive Graphics Laboratory.
I really wanted a programmable computer though. Back then, the IMSAI and Altair were just way too expensive, easily $5-10,000 in today money. Even the TRS-80 was out of our family’s budget. My high school got a single TRS-80 my senior year and they let me play with it a little. I got in trouble for naming a file FUCK.BAS but luckily Mr. Smith had a good sense of humor. Still, no IMSAI for me.
My folks bought me a TRS-80 Pocket Computer as a graduation gift and I started to learn BASIC. It was relatively affordable and super cool to have a whole ‘actual’ computer in your pocket. I programmed a baccarat game and polished up on my James Bond skills for a while. Later, while I was in college, Jim’s brother bought an Apple II and it came with a free Timex-Sinclair which I convinced him to give me, since, well, he had an Apple II.
I did my first computer graphics on that. I drew a sine wave and was so proud I took a photo.
Soon after, I bought a Macintosh, within the first ‘100 days’ of its release that Jobs said would make-or-break it. I used it to invite my now wife back to my place to ‘show her my etchings’ and the rest is history I suppose.
That brings us back to the IMSAI. I saw a replica model that runs a beautiful z80 / 8080 emulator from an Australian company The High Nibble. It uses an ESP32-PICO-KIT running the z80pack emulation suite. It took a few days of procrastinating soldering, and I got it running. It sits peacefully on a table in my living room and has a beautifully cool web interface that lets me run things like Zork, Rogue, WordStar, the works. It is so fun to write bits in manually (but yes, tedious… bleh, who cares) and toggle the run/stop switch to see blinkenlights. I brought it in for my students to see. They have spent the semester using the Raspberry Pi Pico to make vehicles and were a little concerned that this thing uses a Pico to go back in time many decades. But, now I have a beautiful box that I lusted after as a kid, just in time to play Global Thermonuclear War.
AR Air Hockey
Freshman Imaging Project ‘sports ball tracking’ project demo for RIT Undergraduate Research presentation.
And the poster