Pixar Image Computer
Pixar Animation Studios' own P-II Pixar Image Computer.
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| Developer | Pixar |
|---|---|
| Release date | 1986 |
| Units sold | Fewer than 300 |
The Pixar Image Computer is a graphics designing computer originally developed by the Graphics Group; the computer division of Lucasfilm, 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 did not sell in quantity.
When George Lucas recruited people from NYIT in 1979 to start the Computer Division, the group was set to develop digital optical printing, digital audio, digital non-linear editing and computer graphics. Where computer graphics were concerned, the quality was just not good enough due to technological limitations at the time. The team then decided to solve the problem by starting a hardware project, building what they would call the Pixar Image Computer, a machine with more computational power that was able to produce images with higher resolution.
About three months after the acquisition by Steve Jobs on February 3, 1986, the computer became commercially available for the first time, and was aimed at commercial and scientific high-end visualization markets, such as medicine, geophysics and meteorology. The machine sold for $135,000, but also required a $35,000 workstation from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics (in total, equivalent to $371,000 in 2016). The original machine was well ahead of its time and generated a lot of single sales, for labs and research. However, the system did not sell in quantity.
In 1987, Pixar redesigned the machine to create the P-II second generation machine, which sold for $30,000. 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.
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