I first met Alvy Ray Smith III during my freshman year, 54 years ago, at New York University, School of Engineering and Science, at University Heights in the Bronx, N.Y. He was Professor Smith at that time, and he taught switching and automata theory, AI, along with programming. Program language in those days was Fortran IV and we used punch cards for the program entry. NYU had a UNIVAC computer that took up an entire room. It contained the processor and was filled with many racks of tape drives for the memory.
On my first day of class, Professor Smith strode into the classroom and sat on the professor’s desk. We thought he was one of us until he proclaimed “Hi, I’m Alvy Ray Smith III and I will be teaching this computer class outside on the lawn this semester.” He made the topic interesting, exciting, and we learned so much about computer basics and Fortran IV.
Professor Smith and Ed Catmull actually hated Fortran IV, and later in his career, along with Ed Catmull, they started the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) Computer Graphics lab. They refused to use Fortran IV and programmed in assembly code until one day C arrived—and they “pounced” on it. At last, an elegant language!
Alvy Ray Smith, who co-founded Pixar, is still educating today. His book begins by looking at a 20,000 BCE cave drawing of a walking boar that appeared to move its legs and head in the flickering firelight of a Paleolithic “movie theater.” Fast forward to the new 2000 millennium to the Great Digital Convergence—a new digital medium with “bits” that replaced all previous analog media. So, the bit was the universal medium and the pixel, a particular packaging of bits, changed the world of Digital Light with pictures made from pixels.
Moore’s Law
Moore’s Law, crafted by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, plays a very important role in bringing Digital Light to life. The Law has its intellectual origins based on the transistor, which led to the integrated circuit (IC). After Moore’s Law, computers got smaller and essentially denser. The most succinct statement of Alvy Ray Smith’s thoughts on Moore's Law is found on pages 301 to 304 in this book, although he also mentions the "Law" in many other places as well.
Moore said that the number of components on an IC doubles every 18 months. In this book, Smith states a reformation of Moore’s Law: “Everything good about computers gets an order of magnitude better every five years: ‘10X in 5’ is a brief way to remember it.”
The Book Structure
Professor Smith outlines three foundational ideas—waves, computations, and pixels—in the first three chapters of this book by the people responsible for these ideas (Part 1 of the book).
Part 2 book begins with the initial emergence of the first digital pictures. The first pixels were on the first computer (named “Baby”) created by British engineers Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn in 1948, along with the first computer memory system. Their efforts narrowly edged out British mathematician Alan Turing and Hungarian Janos von Neumann; some say it may have been a tie. However, Williams and Kilburn created the first Digital Light! Part 2 also explains movies and animation along with a sampling time discussion.
Part 3 outlines “The Rise and Shine of Digital Light,” discussing interpolation versus sampling, and ultimately leads to the “Millennium and the Movie.” This amazing book finishes with a chapter entitled “The Great Digital Convergence,” in which pixels are shown to be the fundamental component in Digital Pictures.
Alvy Ray Smith manages to delve deep into the emergence of the pixel, as he spans many years of imaging history, while teaching the reader audience the complete biography of the pixel.
I’m keeping this book on my electronics bookshelf as an excellent reference filled with wonderful historical significance spanning hundreds of years. It’s like being in class with Professor Smith all over again, learning in his uniquely interesting and captivating style of education. I highly recommend this book, not just to technical people, but also to readers interested in a key part of history and imaging.