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Pixar Image Computer

Updated 7 February 2025

Before Pixar became a household name with talking toys and hopping lamps, they made serious, high-end computers that most people never got to touch. The Pixar Image Computer was a cutting-edge, wildly expensive workstation aimed at medical imaging, military applications, and Hollywood studios that could afford to throw money at futuristic graphics tech. If you've ever wanted a machine that sits somewhere between a Sharp X68000 multimedia workstation and a Cray supercomputer, this is it—assuming you can find one. Spoiler: You probably can't.

Pixar Image Computer mast head
photo  Creative Commons image provided by Wikimedia

Introduction

The late 1980s was a golden era for exotic high-performance computing. If you wanted the ultimate multimedia workstation, you bought a Commodore Amiga. If you needed brute-force number crunching, you called Cray Supercomputer and mortgaged your business. But what if you wanted to process high-resolution images in a way no other system could? That's where the Pixar Image Computer came in—a machine designed to handle graphics with almost ridiculous precision.

You may think of Pixar as the studio behind Toy Story, but before Buzz and Woody, they built a graphics powerhouse aimed at Hollywood, military research, and medical imaging. It was a workstation for the elite, but it had a fatal flaw: almost no one bought it.

In this article, I'll dive into what made this machine so unique, how it worked, and, of course, how I'd hook it up to an Amiga 4000 running AMIX in an alternate universe where I have both of these unicorns.

Description

The Pixar Image Computer was a 21-inch-high rack-mounted beast, filled with specialized processing boards that made your average PC look like a child's toy. The base configuration included:

Pixar development system typical configuration
diagram:  Pixar development system typical configuration

If you were feeling fancy (or rich), you could max it out with three CHAPs, two Video Boards, and six memory boards, turning it into the ultimate image-processing rig of the time.

It required 200-250V AC and could dissipate up to 3KW of power. That&pos;s three kilowatts, folks—enough to keep your entire house toasty in winter. Good thing it had no moving parts because anything with fans would've sounded like a jet engine.

Unix Workstation Control

Unlike a typical computer, the Pixar Image Computer had no user interface of its own. You couldn't just plug in a keyboard and start typing away. Instead, it needed a separate Unix workstation to control it, because that’s just how serious machines did things back then.

Pixar officially paired it with a Sun-3 workstation, running a SunOS-based operating system. A standard setup included a 380MB hard drive, which sounds laughable now but was high-end at the time.

This raises an interesting question: what Unix workstation would I have used? I took a vote in my imaginary office, and the unanimous winner was the Amiga 4000 running AMIX. Yes, I know it wasn't a real option, but let me dream.

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A View From AMIX

If I had an Amiga 4000 running AMIX (which I don't), I'd absolutely link it to a Pixar Image Computer and pretend I was an elite 1980s graphics wizard. The setup would involve Ethernet magic, UNIX wizardry, and possibly some duct tape.

Would it be efficient? No. Would it be practical? Also no. But it would be the coolest way to run an image-processing supercomputer with a machine best known for gaming demos and tracker music.

And if I really wanted to go overboard, I'd use all that processing power for Bitcoin mining—at a blazing speed of maybe one Bitcoin per millennium.

Conclusion

The Pixar Image Computer was a fascinating experiment in high-end image processing, but ultimately, it was a commercial failure. It was too expensive, too niche, and too dependent on an external Unix system. Despite its fate, it remains one of the coolest, rarest pieces of retrocomputing history.

Related articles

Wikipedia Article on Pixar Image Computer

Pixar Image Computer
article

Pixar User's Manual

Pixar User's Manual
(read online)

Pixar Programmer's Manual

Pixar Programmer's Manual
(read online)

Commodore Amiga Unix system, Amix

Running Linux/Unix
Workstations on Amiga

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