Pixar began not as a film studio but as the computer graphics research group inside Lucasfilm. In the Computer History Museum oral history he recorded as a 2013 CHM Fellow, Ed Catmull recounts how, after leading the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology, he was recruited by George Lucas to build a graphics division at Lucasfilm in the late 1970s. That group, which included Alvy Ray Smith, Loren Carpenter, and Rob Cook, pushed the frontier of rendering, modeling, and digital compositing while also designing a specialized image-processing machine, the Pixar Image Computer.
In 1986 the division was spun out as an independent company, with financing from Steve Jobs, who had recently left Apple. Pixar’s early business plan was built around selling the Pixar Image Computer as high-end hardware, with software and short animated films serving partly to demonstrate what the machine could do. The hardware business never reached the scale its founders hoped for, and the company gradually shifted its center of gravity toward software and animation.
The most durable product of that shift was RenderMan, Pixar’s rendering software and the accompanying RenderMan Interface Specification, introduced in 1988. As Pixar’s own RenderMan history page describes, RenderMan was built on the Reyes architecture (Renders Everything You Ever Saw), and it was this technology that “allowed Pixar to make the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story (1995).”
Throughout its history Pixar invested heavily in computer science research, not just production. Its staff authored a long series of influential SIGGRAPH papers on subjects such as the Reyes image-rendering architecture, distributed ray tracing, shading languages, and subdivision surfaces. Several of these techniques, including Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces, became standard tools across the entire graphics industry rather than remaining proprietary to Pixar.
Pixar’s “Our Story” page traces the arc from a small technology group to a studio whose feature films reshaped animation. The company was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, after which Catmull went on to lead both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. The combination of original research, production tools, and storytelling makes Pixar one of the clearest cases in which deep computer science investment translated directly into a new artistic medium.