This is what I had on my desk when I arrived at Pixar.

A Sun-2 (the CPU cabinet is ‘desk side’) and a Barco monitor. 640 x 480. That optical mouse was great, so much better than the mechanical mice of the time. I have one with a Philips or Picker logo on it in the archives somewhere.

Years ago, I became fascinated with Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org site. It features his takes on the history of the Macintosh and the team behind it. I bought an original Macintosh in 1984, taking out a loan that I am probably still paying off. I eventually ended up working for Steve Jobs at Pixar, right after it was founded. I had/have intense personal interest.

So, I thought, hey, why not put together some of my old Pixar stuff?

If you want an exhaustive history of Pixar from one of the founders you can’t do any better than Alvy Ray Smith’s documentation. It’s spectacular, thorough, and complete. I was one of the earlier employees of the company who started with designing the user interface (this wasn’t really a commonly used term in the mid 1980s, for what that’s worth) and software for a volume rendering workstation we developed for Picker (we started the pitch for Philips but the deal fell through).

I’ll post things here that come from my archives. Let me know if there’s anything you’re interested in specifically at folklore at flipphillips.com.