Bells Labs and SGI Intersection

Back around 1981 when I was at Bell Labs and worked for Hal Alles, (semi-famous for inventing an amazing music synthesizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Digital_Synthesizer). During the summer there was a summer student who came and aside from playing a lot of tennis with Hal did a lot of work on computer graphics hardware on a VLSI chip. At the time I was programming something called the “Computer Animation Processor” which was a real time hidden surface computer graphics machine that Bell Labs thought might be usable for multi-person games. The idea, remember this was Bell Labs of AT&T, was to encourage the use of phone communication and for people to pley games with each other. I produced a whole bunch of animation demos (great job actually) (see the video Bell Labs Animation Processor https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=98EyJG-xmu4). The computer graphics on this thing were sped up by the use of a lot of specialized hardware which included some chips that did matrix multiplication in real time.  It turns out that that summer student was Marc Hannah who a couple of years later founded Silicon Graphics with his PhD advisor Jim Clark.  Given this connection I was fortunate enough to actually see the original Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation which was shown in a hotel suite at the 1983 (i think) SIGGRAPH. Amusingly I walked in on the SGI running a real time version of Rubik’s cube on the display, which was very similar the Rubik’s cube I had created on the Bell Labs Animation Processor. Rubik’s Cube was still a fad back then. It was breathtaking to see a commercial machine that had that level of graphics power.