Jurassic Park. The Abyss. Beauty and the Beast. And, 35 years ago this month, Terminator 2. In this edition of Tech Time Warp, we look back at the contributions of Dr. Marc Regis, co-founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), whose innovations helped make these cinematic milestones possible.
The engine that changed computer graphics
Born and raised in Chicago, Hannah attended the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Bell Laboratories scholarship, graduating in 1977. Then, as a graduate student at Stanford University, Hannah met engineering professor Jim Clark, who shared his passion for 3-D graphics. In 1982, Clark, Hannah, and five other partners founded SGI, raising over $30 million in venture capital.
These early investors were intrigued by the “Geometry Engine,” a Clark/Hannah project that solved the problem associated with contemporary central processing units (CPUs). The CPUs were fast, but they were only fast when performing one task at a time. This worked all right for data, but when it came to the myriad calculations required to create 3-D graphics, it didn’t. As this U.S. Black Engineer profile of Hannah states: “Trying to create realistic graphics with a CPU was like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.”
How SGI transformed Hollywood
The Geometry Engine solved this challenge by working alongside the CPU. The SGI machines had one processor for logic and another for visualizations. The result? The first SGI prototype was given to George Lucas himself in 1984, and SGI machines quickly became a Hollywood favorite. By 1993, SGI earned over $1 billion in revenue, and in 1995, Pixar used SGI hardware to create Toy Story, the first entirely computer-generated feature-length animated film.
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