Regarding our simplified version of Moore’s Law (see prior post), in the mid-90’s I built a spreadsheet to see what had actually happened. At that point we had about 15 years of technology investing behind us which I charted out. The result was that there was about a 1.8x price performance improvement every year. This was not a measurement of raw compute speed per dollar, but rather the average cost of what we were spending to support an animator – so it was really an amalgam of compute power, memory costs and storage costs, and a very realistic indicator of what we could expect to be spending.

I’m a big fan of Andy Kessler. His articles are always worth reading, providing insight to parts of the financial world I don’t play in, and giving his unique spin to it all. His most recent emailing included an excerpt from his new book, Running Money. In this section, he recalls meeting an entrepreneur who was pitching a new keyboard product, I cracked up at the following part:

“Here is photo of our chip, pretty small, doesn’t cost us more than $5 in volume. TSMC in Taiwan makes it for us. Over here is the harmonizer, the pitch control, tempo stabilizer. Here is a DSP to do Fourier transforms. There’s not much else to it.”

“What is that section at the bottom corner, labeled 780?”

“Oh that. Well I grew up programming DEC machines, so when I needed something to control the whole process, I just sat down and threw in a VAX.”

“An entire VAX?”

“Sure, it’s no big deal, just a little 1 MIPS VAX 11/780.”

“You’re kidding. I bought one of those 15 plus years ago for close to a million bucks.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It fit right there in the corner, cost me about an extra 25 cents in chip cost, well worth it. Every chip has some 1 MIPS controller on it these days, it was just easier for me to stick in a VAX than to buy someone elses.”

We had a VAX 11/750 at PDI around 1984, and indeed it was worth about a million bucks. It was the machine of choice in the computer graphics world at the time, a time when computers were compared in size to home appliances rather than books. Ours was the size of three washing machines; replacing the far inferior PDP 11/44 refrigerator (don’t stick a magnet on it or you’ll erase the tape!).

Around that time is when we decided our goal was create our own fully animated films. The problem, though, was very succinctly put by someone at NYIT (who’s own VAX was working on a film called “The Works”) when he said, “If we start now, we’ll have the film rendered in 15 years.”

That wasn’t going to work, nor would spending $15 million to get it done in one year. We were smart enough to know Moore’s Law, though we used a greatly simplified version: “The price performance of computing doubles every year.” A simple extrapolation said that in a decade we’d have 1000x the computing power for the same cost. That might start to work.

Because of that we knew we would be technologically limited from doing what we really wanted to do for a decade. Nice to be a little ahead of the curve, huh? But this was incredibly powerful knowledge; we could instead focus our efforts on building up everything else we would need so that when the technology was there we would be ready. That approach set the tone for our steps from broadcast graphics to commercials to film effects to finally getting to do our own films.

It took us 12 years to get our deal with DreamWorks, so we weren’t too far off.

First, an icebreaker. What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?

It was the mid-80’s, and PDI was working hard to break into the television commercial business. We had clients from out of town that had come to spend the day reviewing our progress, giving feedback and hopefully approving the work so far. Their day would be spent in a dark room staring at monitors, requesting changes and waiting (and waiting) while the animator re-rendered sequences to show them. Between the two or three clients from the agency, our producer and a couple of animators, there were usually more people in the room than it could comfortably handle. As President and CEO, I always made it a point to spend some time with the clients – it’s important to let them know they are the single biggest priority the company has. Wheeling an extra chair into the cramped room, I joined everyone for a pizza lunch. Part way through I had to step out to take a phone call (an act I abhor, so I imagine it must have been pretty urgent). Not wanting to interrupt the conversation when I returned, I quietly slipped in and sat back down in my chair. My unusually soft chair… that was oddly warm… and in a brilliant flash of hindsight, I realized that due to lack of table space I had put my lunch on my chair when I left.

Now comes the dilemma. How can you discreetly get out of the room with a big slice of pizza stuck to your ass? Answer: you can’t. So I took the high road. I started laughing and told everyone I had a funny story to share. We all had a good laugh, and I backed out of the room wheeling my chair with me.

We had a washer and dryer at the office (presumably for just these types of emergencies), so within an hour or so I was back. We all had another laugh, and it all turned out fine. I’m sure that story made the rounds back at the agency the next day; it sure did around our office.

The lesson? Pretty simple – laugh a lot and admit it when you screw up.

I’ve decided to jump into the bogging fray. I’ve enjoyed reading a bunch of other blogs, primarily busness related, and the best ones call to mind personal moments that have defined or directed my life. Some of those experiences have been big lessons, but most have been small and seemingly meaningless at the moment. Yet years later, these are the stories I keep coming back to; simple events that reveal more complex ideas.

Time to share.