— ROGERS

This is a very interesting (100 minute!) panel discussion featuring various computer graphics industry legends (details below), who pretty much have the Bay Area and Pixar in common… anyway, this is not a super-tech, jargon-filled discussion – rather it is more like an oral history of computer graphics.

[Recorded May 16, 2005]
Brad Bird, Writer/Director, The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, Co-Founder and President, Pixar Animation Studios, Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of four centers of computer graphics excellence (Altamira, Pixar, Lucasfilm, New York Tech) and a Microsoft Fellow, Andrew Stanton, Writer/ Director, Finding Nemo, Pixar Animation Studios , and Michael Rubin, Moderator, Author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution

My first real computer was the Commodore Vic 20. I did have contact with computers before that (mainly Apple II’s at friends houses), but I was excited enough to spend a large part of my Saturday mornings in 1982 typing—via hunt-and-peck—small programs from magazines. Mainly they were games and mainly they didn’t work. “Syntax Error” was the bane of my life. When something did work, the computer graphics usually consisted of an “@” or a couple or greater-than symbols,or anything else you could find on a keyboard. It did, however, teach me to type.