Pixar Image Computer
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The Pixar Image Computer was a graphics designing computer made by Pixar in May 1986, intended for the high-end visualization markets, such as medicine. The machine sold for $135,000.00, but also required a $35,000.00 workstation from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics. The original machine was well ahead of it's time, and generated a lot of single sales, for labs and research. However the system did not sell in quantity. In 1987 Pixar re-designed the machine to create the P-II second generation machine (pictured at right) sold for $30k.
In an attempt to gain a foothold in the medical market, Pixar donated ten machines to leading hospitals and sent marketing people to doctor's conventions. However, this had little effect on sales, despite the machine's ability to perform CAT scans and show perfect images of the human body. Pixar did get a contract with the manufacturer of CAT Scanners, which sold 30 machines. Buy a million dollar scanner, and get a $30k 3D visualization system. However doctors were not trained to look at 3D, and could be sued unless they looked at the individual slices, per their training. By 1988 Pixar had only sold 120 Pixar Image Computers.
In 1988, Pixar began the development of the PII-9, a nine slot version of the low cost P-II. This machine was coupled with the world's first RAID disks, 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 D to A converters which were programmable for a variety of frame rates and resolutions, and finally an overlay board which ran NeWS, and the 9 slot chassis. A full-up system was quite expensive, as the 3 GB RAID was $300k alone. At this time in history most file systems could only address 2 GB of disk. This system was aimed at high end government imaging applications which were done by dedicated systems produced by the aeorspace industry 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 was defining the state of the art in commercial image processing, however 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. Less than 300 Pixar Image Computers were ever sold.
The Pixar Image computer business was sold to Vicom (not Viacom, as an earlier version of this page stated) in 1990 for $2M. Vicom went Chapter 11 within a year.
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 '90s. The government mass deployment that drove the PII-9 development occurred in the late 1990's, in a program called Integrated Exploitation Capability (IEC).
Walt Disney Feature Animation used dozens of the Pixar Image Computers for CAPS and was using them in production up through Pocahontas in 1995.
[edit] Specifications
The P-II could have two Channel Processors, or Chaps. Each Chap is a 4-way parallel (RGBA) image computer. The chassis shown here could hold 4 cards. Another model, the PII-9 could hold 9 cards (4 Chaps, 2 Video processors, 2 Off Screen Memory (OSM) cards, and an Overlay Board for the PostScript Windowing System (NeWS). The Overlay board ran a Network Extensible Windowing System (NeWS). The extensions added were to control the image pipeline for roaming, image comparison, and stereo image viewing. The PII-9 was the imaging engine for a UNIX host. This was a SIMD architecture, which was good for imagery and video applications. It processed four image channels in parallel, one for red, one for green, one for blue, and one for the alpha channel. Pixar invented the alpha channel. It processed imagery in 12 bits per color channel (or 48 bits per pixel) and could output with 10 bit accuracy.
