1988, 1989, and 1990 were exciting times to be at Pixar.  Here is a brochure from those times.

The Applications included Scientific visualization, Remote sensing and mapping, Medical imaging, and Graphic arts and design. Pixar’s Products were the Image Computer hardware, and software.

A brief chronology shows the spin-off in 1986 from Lucasfilm to Steven P. Jobs.

The Pixar-II hardware had just been released.  This was a 4 slot chassis, which could hold 1or 2 Chap processors, 0-2 memory cards, and 1-2 video cards ( 4 cards total ).

I joined Pixar at the start of the largest Pixar development ever, a 9 slot chassis, which could hold 1-4 Chaps, 0-2 memory cards, 1-2 video cards, and an Overlay board.  We implemented NeWS, a Network extensible Windowing System on the “Overboard”, allowing postscript based graphics to be drawn on top of the imaging system.

We implemented an image computing pipeline that included an early RAID disk subsystem, a high speed bus, and a hardware decompression card, firmware controlled pixel crunching from 4 Channel processors (Chaps), each of which was 4 way parallel (RGBA), and pipelined.  We built a high performance Electronic Light Table, complete with multispectral image processing tools.

We delivered four prototypes to a government facility, with the state-of-the-art software imagery exploitation system in 1990.