pixar image computer - Steve Jobs -Museum-Quality Artifact, very rare- Lucasfilm

This computer was originally developed by the Computer Division of Lucasfilm, later renamed Pixar after being purchased by Steve Jobs on February 3, 1986.

What's unique about this computer is the tomb stone design and matching monitor paint scheme.

This is a museum-quality historical artifact, I am unsure if it is in working condition because I don't currently have a power cord to test the computer. I was able to turn on the monitor. It powered on and a green light came on by the power switch however the screen did not light up. I'm unsure if that was a result of not being connected to the computer. This is being sold as is and is being sold as a non working computer.

When I listed this item I had very little information about this item. Yestarday I talked to Bruce and this is what he had to say: This is actually a PIXAR II Image Computer (PIC II). It was the second generation product and it will not do anything without a workstation connected to it and it looks like the workstation interface card is missing. Looking at the serial number, it was manufactured in July/August of 1988 and includes one CHAP SIMD processor card and one memory expansion card. I won't comment on the value of it now, but in its day, it would run circles around anything short of a Cray for certain image processing tasks such as convolution filters and compositing, which is what is was designed for. Comparing it to an SGI machine or any other graphics workstation is not really a reasonable comparison as they were designed for completely differnt tasks. A graphics workstation was all about 3D graphics with heavy floating point computational requirements. The PIC was designed for image processing, not graphics, and didn't even have floating point hardware, although there was a version of REYES that ran on it and a good portion of the Pixar short "Red's Dream" was actually rendered on PICs. I was one of the engineers that built the thing, so it really did bring back some memories. Good luck on finding it a good home! In a follow up phone call he said that about 100 of the first generation were made and about 200 of this model were made. The two people to purchase these machines on the east cost were John Hopkins University and the US Navy. So more then likely this was one of those.