Comment by socalgal2

11 hours ago

It's an interesting story about their IPO.

What I found interesting in the book "Creativity Inc" by their co-founder, Ed Catmull, was that Jobs effectively gave them 70 million and 3-4 years of them trying to make computers before they pivoted to animation. I'd love someone to give me 70 million :P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity,_Inc.

PS: I read the book when it came out. I don't have it around to check my memory is correct about 3-4 years and 70 million. What I remeber is they were a subdivision of ILM tasked with making computers. ILM tried to sell them to HP IIRC, who was not interested. Jobs bought them to make computers, not animation.

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socalgal2

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JKCalhoun  9 hours ago

The Pixar story is also a kind of an interesting angle on either Jobs blindness or brilliance—thinking that Pixar was a software company, thinking it was a hardware company, and only belatedly coming around to the idea that it was in fact a film studio…

  • Keyframe  7 hours ago

    Turns out Pixar _was_ a software company which also did hardware when it was sold. There was another part of ILM that stayed with Lucas which was an VFX shop where most of creatives were. ILM also got rights to use (full source) PRMan/Renderman from it. With Pixar you also got a creative demo team with Lasseter which produced demo shorts that turned into a studio. Lasseter is mostly the story there, no matter the software Pixar did, imo.