A (now-deleted) tweet last night by Pixar director Mark Walsh announced that one of the company’s earliest employees, Loren Carpenter (pictured above right, with Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith), retired on Friday at the age of 66. To give a sense of his impact on the company, Carpenter was the guy who invented the name Pixar. The invaluable book Droidmaker
Loren Carpenter was still lobbying for “Cinematrix” for either the product or the division, but couldn’t get anyone to sign on. One evening, Loren, Alvy [Ray Smith], Jim Blinn, and Rodney Stock headed out to dinner to try to work through the problem. They settled into a booth at The Country Garden, the nearest place to their offices where you could sit down and get pretty good food at any hour. It was a little noisy, but comfortable.
“Let’s just name it after what it does. It makes pictures,” pointed out Alvy. “But it should sound cool and scientific, like ‘laser.'”
Everyone gave nods of agreement between bites. “The ‘er’ at the end is good. It’s a Spanish suffix that makes it a verb. Laser…pixel laser…pixer…”
Alvy stopped. “Pixer? That’s pretty good.”
“It sounds weird,” said Loren.
“Well, something like pixer.”
“That name will never stick,” said Loren.
“Why not?”
Loren thought for a moment.. It just sounds kind of…strange. What about pixar.”
“That’s good,” said Alvy.
Jim and Rodney didn’t stop eating, but their eyes registered consensus. Loren was mulling it over.
“Then it sounds a little more like ‘radar,’ and sort of astronomical, like ‘quasar’ or ‘pulsar,'” Loren added.
Blinn, as an unofficial space program delegate to the meal, looked up from his soup and nodded in agreement.
Alvy was pleased. “You know, ‘ar’ is another Spanish verb ending,” he said, in further support of his case.
“I like it. If we call it Pixar it will stick, and it sounds cool,” said Loren. “This will stick.”
Carpenter is one of the key figures in the development of both computer animation and Pixar, and his role in naming Pixar (as cool as it is) would rank the least of his contributions to the company. Carpenter had started experimenting with computer animation in the late-1970s when he was an engineer at Boeing. On his own, he made Vol Libre, the first computer animated film that used fractals to generate its graphics.
After he presented that film at SIGGRAPH in 1980, he was immediately offered a job in the Lucasfilm Computer Division. When he joined the company in January 1981, he became employee number six of the division that would eventually turn into Pixar. (To put that into perspective, John Lasseter was the 22nd person hired in the division.) Carpenter further refined his software to create the anti-aliased fractal planet for the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
