How Pixar Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Linux

If you weren’t already aware, it will probably come as no surprise to hear that the pioneering computer-animation studio Pixar built its early workflow on Silicon Graphics SGI workstations. How Pixar Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Linux. These were beefy Unix machines that, as the name implied, were developed for graphical work.

When the age of the RISC workstation came to a close, many Unix users were pushed onto Windows NT — but not at Pixar. It comes down to hardware rather than software. You know the story: PCs got faster and cheaper with different vendors competing for a giant market, while the world of RISC workstations couldn’t keep its lead.

Pixar would have been happy staying on Unix workstations, even SGIs if that had been a practical option — but with every project increasing the load on the render farms, it wasn’t. Yet Pixar’s entire workflow was predicated on an Unix environment. They had written a couple million lines of code for their internal use, and really didn’t want to port it over to Windows, even after a mistaken rm command nearly cost the world Toy Story 2.