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what's touched on here seems to me as the best approach - showing up with a passion / vision with talented colleagues, then working towards that through any means possible.
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What year are we talking? I get that is a pretty big use case now, but back then (mid 1980s?) was it also the case?
When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they got it because some oil company had gotten a better supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or earlier. Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400... : > Supercomputers are becoming a u…
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> What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him? Same with the job interview? My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy needs for scientific computation and data visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.
Oil and gas industries are data crunching monsters. While I thought it was impressive I got to work with I’m convinced if SV hadn’t happened in SV it would have happened in Dallas or Houston.
Part of what attracted investors and innovators to the bay were the non-compete laws and counter culture of the time.
I can't find the interview but maybe someone knows which one I'm talking about. It was around how the graphical designers put a lot of effort around designing the under side of a draw inside of a desk which no one will see. It was around the topic of going the extra mile for the things that don't matter to set the stage on how much they must care about the things that do matter.
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When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
You won't find a lot of polygons, but you would find many interesting surface textures, shaders, lighting effects, simulations and more.
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Also relevant https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage...
I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.) Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real differe…
Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed.
The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad studios.
That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
> It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687900
> https://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-1...
>> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
>> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
> So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any more:
> Page Not Found
> Oops! We can't find that page!
> We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are some good places to start.
Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it. It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.
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I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved in collusion.) Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like $4k or something, not enough to make any real differe…
Of course, another way to read this is that these studios weren't viable if they had to play by the rules. So they broke the rules and violated the rights of their staff. Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules, they closed. The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad studios.
I happen to know for a fact that’s not true in either case of the two studios I worked for.
I also don’t particularly appreciate your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios. Both I worked for were quite good studios, one of them being PDI which made the Shrek & Madagascar movies. No idea to what degree the studios were involved at all, only the parent companies were named. (Edit: actually I’m certain the other studio was not participating in any way, but was still part of the class, being Disney owned. I’ve edited my upper comment to clarify.)
The truth of the CG & VFX industry is that it was always bad margins in the US. Pretty much the whole industry imploded in the US some time after this lawsuit. Not in response to the lawsuit, just because the business is hard to sustain, and subsidies in Canada, Europe, India, and China, has made outsourcing a much bigger part of the picture. The CG film industry hasn’t died exactly, but in the US it’s definitely still on life support.
And I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries either. It was then and is now still true that working in digital entertainment doesn’t pay on average and for entry level employees as well as working in other areas of tech.
This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.
... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.
“One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. ”
“Before I knew it, we were in each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted. “What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs stormed out.”
Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.”