I grew up just down river from Ann Magnuson, one half of Bongwater. They informed the world of David’s needs in this wonderful song.

In between leaving Pixar and starting back to grad school, I connected with then-former Pixar buddies Rob Cook¹ and Ty Roberts. Rob is responsible for a variety of great things in RenderMan and it was really nice to see him again a few months ago at the IEEE RenderMan award.

Rob and Ty left Pixar to start a company, LightSource. I did some consulting with them during grad school. I worked on some of the original Apple OneScanner software and wrote a nonlinear video editing system for the NEC PC-VCR. This was before QuickTime (aka Warhol) was released. Video editing from tape to tape, just like we did with the 3/4″ Sony decks of the era.

As the LightSource mission was coming to an end, Ty spun out a company, Ion, for doing cutting-dege music and media related things. One of the things that I worked on that I really enjoyed was an Enhanced CD for David Bowie called Jump².³ (I posted that I found some of the code a while back.) It contained a few tracks from Bowie’s Black Tie White Noise that you could remix in real time⁴.

Check out that amazing interface and the system requirements. The disk had some amazingly good Macromedia Director interactive animation by, um, Roger something whose name I can’t remember now? I wrote the low-level signal processing code for doing the sound. That was my particular domain of expertise.

I met a lot of great people at LightSource and Ion, several I’m still friends with. It was a great way to spend that ‘buffer time’.

Last week, during some inventory and cleaning (aka, unpacking old boxes that haven’t seen the light of day for decades?) I found this amazing artifact –

A DAT from The Hit Factory. I remember one of Bob Ludwig’s folks sent it to me at school, we read it on the DAT backup reader for one of the SGI boxes we had!

It may or may not be of interest to someone involved in cataloging and documenting Bowie’s work. If so, feel free to get in touch.

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1. Not the Florida Attorney or Rugby Union player. And, whoa, someone replace that photo of him in Wikipedia with something not so terrifyingly bleh. ↩︎
2. I got to meet and visit Brian Eno during that adventure, a post in itself. ↩︎
3. Good thing I didn’t bank on the resale value of these beauties for my kid’s college fund. ↩︎
4. Fun fact, the track we ended up using features Lester Bowie, one of my favorite third-stream jazz trumpeters of the era, and is, alas, no relation to David. ↩︎