Пиксардың бейне компьютерi: тарихы мен тағдыры

Graphics designing computer by Pixar

The Pixar Image Computer is a graphics computer originally developed by the Graphics Group, the computer division of Lucasfilm, which was later renamed Pixar. Aimed at commercial and scientific high end visualization markets, such as medicine, geophysics and meteorology, the original machine was advanced for its time, but sold poorly.

When George Lucas recruited people from NYIT in 1979 to start their Computer Division, the group was set to develop digital optical printing, digital audio, digital non linear editing and computer graphics. The machine sold for $135,000, but also required a $35,000 workstation from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics (in total, 170000.0 in 1986 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years). The original machine was well ahead of its time and generated many single sales, for labs and research. In an attempt to gain a foothold in the medical market, Pixar donated ten machines to leading hospitals and sent marketing people to doctors' conventions. However, this had little effect on sales, despite the machine's ability to render CAT scan data in 3D to show perfect images of the human body. Pixar did get a contract with the manufacturer of CAT Scanners, which sold 30 machines. By 1988 Pixar had only sold 120 Pixar Image Computers. a high performance bus, a hardware image decompression card, 4 processors (called Chaps or channel processors), very large memory cards (VME sized card full of memory), high resolutions video cards with 10 bit DACs which were programmable for a variety of frame rates and resolutions, and finally an overlay board which ran NeWS, as well as the 9 slot chassis. A full up system was quite expensive, as the 3 GiB RAID was $300,000 alone. At this time in history most file systems could only address 2 GiB of disk. This system was aimed at high end government imaging applications, which were done by dedicated systems produced by the aerospace industry and which cost a million dollars a seat. The PII 9 and the associated software became the prototype of the next generation of commercial "low cost" workstations.

In 1990, the Pixar Image Computer was defining the state of the art in commercial image processing. Despite this, the government decided that the per seat cost was still too high for mass deployment and to wait for the next generation systems to achieve cost reductions. This decision was the catalyst for Pixar to lay off its hardware engineers and sell the imaging business. There were no high volume buyers in any industry. Fewer than 300 Pixar Image Computers were ever sold. The Pixar computer business was sold to Vicom Systems in 1990 for $2,000,000. Vicom Systems filed for Chapter 11 within a year afterwards. Many of the lessons learned from the Pixar Image Computer made it into the Low Cost Workstation (LCWS) and Commercial Analyst Workstation (CAWS) program guidelines in the early and mid 1990s. The government mass deployment that drove the PII 9 development occurred in the late 1990s, in a program called Integrated Exploitation Capability (IEC).

The P II could have two Channel Processors, or Chaps. The chassis could hold 4 cards. The PII 9 could hold 9 cards (4 Chaps, 2 video processors, 2 Off Screen Memory (OSM) cards, and an Overlay Board for the NeWS windowing system). NeWS was extended to control the image pipeline for roaming, image comparison, and stereo image viewing. Each Chap is a 4 way parallel (RGBA) image computer. Walt Disney Feature Animation, whose parent company later purchased Pixar in 2006, used dozens of the Pixar Image Computers for their Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) and was using them in production up through Pocahontas in 1995.