The PICS 2000

The Philips PICS 2000 imaging workstation. Developed at Pixar in 1987.

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… Read More

Listerine Hack

Boxing listerine bottle from Pixar commercial circa 1990

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Chuck Csuri – 1922-2022

Research is just an excuse to have fun and make some crazy art. — Chuck, early 1980s I showed up in Columbus in 1982, a first-generation college student, intent on getting something out of the opportunity to get… Read More

My Favorite Screen Credit

I don’t think IMDB has a category for this role. I’ll drop this here briefly, but this is a slide from Pete Docter‘s Student Academy Award winning short film, Next Door. I will put together a whole post… Read More

Tropicana Commercials – Warehouse

We did a whole bunch of commercial for Tropicana. This was our second — This was the second in a series we did for Tropicana. The first one we did was much simpler, a logo and orange in… Read More

Pixar Goes Commercial…

An article from Computer Graphics World, circa June 1986. $125K for the entry level, in mid-1980’s dollars. You still needed a host (Sun-2 at the time was a good choice) and, if I recall, a display device. There’s… Read More

Folklore

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… Read More

Sony XBR Club

The XBR was Sony’s top-of-the-line consumer CRT TV, back in the good old days. So elite, you got to join a club. I believe it stood for “eXtra BRight”. Steve May used to mock it, calling it the… Read More