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.