Oral History of Brian L. Halla [pdf] (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Oral History of Brian L. Halla [pdf] (2013)

archive.computerhistory.org

30 pointslproven10 comments

The retitling of this submission removes the submitter's intent in sharing the article. It was something like: Gary Kildall wrote Pixar's first renderer - before the renaming.

The submitted title was "Gary Killdall, creator of CP/M, wrote Pixar's original 3D renderer".

Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

(From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.")

Direct link: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Wow. The same Gary Kildall who was first approached by IBM for a PC operating system[a] helped write Pixar's first 3-D renderer.

At a minimum, Kildall's Wikipedia page should be updated with his contribution to Pixar!

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[a] Bill Gates was IBM's second choice, because at the time Microsoft didn't have a PC OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings

Interesting how he was also born in seattle. Seems like how a lot of pioneers of the PC are from there.

Maybe there was something on the water they drank as kids? (I'm joking, in case it's not obvious!)

It’s weird because there are several hotspots like that: Seattle, SLC, Akron, and so on. Each one pumps out greatness for a time, and then things move again.

It works internationally too. eg. von Neumann, Teller, Wigner etc. All Hungarians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

But they came from Mars obviously

It says "Oral History". Is there an audio recording? The Computer History Museum has recordings for other people. I can't find one for this.

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