Today I Found Out:
Before a story about toys, before monsters went corporate, before anyone went searching for Nemo, and before twenty seven Academy Awards, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose clients included the government and the medical community.
Many think Pixar sprung fully formed from the genius of Steve Jobs. This story does a good job of showing the history of the company long before Jobs was ever involved.
When I was attending Cal in the mid-to-late 80’s, whenever we’d go to an animation fesival there would be some Pixar proof-of-concept thing. Not full-fledged cartoons, but animations of objects. We all knew they were a company in nearby Emeryville (at least, I dimly recall we all knew this, though I don’t remember now if we were right). I don’t know if Steve Jobs was involved or not at that point.
There is an excellent book on the history of Pixar: the Pixar Touch by David A. Price – one of the DVDs (I think Wall-E) also had a documentary that is loosely based on the book
Go back a bit further to the days when Alexander Schure was funding Alvy Ray Smith’s research at the nascent NYIT …. The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman details the entire fascinating genesis of PIXAR.
There’s another whole Utah chapter with Evans & Sutherland, too.
Another great book that talks about the history of computer graphics at LucasFilm (which includes the genesis of Pixar) is “Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution”. Pixar and THX aren’t the only things to come out of LucasFilm. Photoshop and lots of other things we take for granted now started there too.
A little nitpick: the underlying tone of the article is quite anti-jobs. For example, this sentence:
“[jobs] allowed Lasseter to lead a team in producing short films to promote the product.”
Could have been written as…
“[jobs] commissioned Lasseter to lead a team in producing short films to promote the product.”
The article is full of this weaselly revisionism.
Who thought Jobs created Pixar??? Only people who weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention.
So most of the tech press.
This.
Jobs did create Pixar. After he bought a nearly-defunct special effects company from Lucas. Then he turned it into arguably the most successful animation studio ever (Disney never had 14 straight hits).
It’s like saying Grant didn’t win the Civil War because McClellan started it.
The animators made Pixar what it is. Jobs provided funding and business direction. They all work in unison but the creativity is what made Pixar. There is a great documentary on Pixar that outlines the whole ordeal.
Well, just like Apple, it all looks so simple when Jobs is the CEO. But look at Apple and Pixar without him, maybe not so damned easy…
I’m no expert on the matter but from my understanding he was completely more silent in Pixar than Apple.
It could’ve been creative story telling to pump up Lasseter, they were very big on his role.
The team that formed the talent of Pixar existed in Industrial Light and Magic. Technically I suppose Jobs created the LLC that is known as Pixar by funding the spin-out from ILM, but you could credit George Lucas’ divorce just as much for forcing the sale 😉 Without that, the whole group might have stayed part of ILM.
Wasn’t Lucas lost on what they were attempting to do with animation? That’s why they didn’t keep the division around, right?