The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [38]
Such were the weird origins of Alex Schure’s New York Institute of Technology, or so went the story. Eventually “New York Tech” began offering courses in classrooms—Alex bought a building near Manhattan’s Lincoln Center—and granting undergraduate degrees. But Alex’s operations always seemed somewhat suspicious.
Although New York Tech is now an accredited school, its early days were unusual. “New York Tech was a diploma mill,” recalled Alvy Ray Smith. “The bookstore sold auto parts. We heard that it was subsidized by a land development deal in Florida.”
Alex Schure exuded mystique. He was a trim, handsome man with dark hair and thick eyebrows. He dressed with excellent taste, but as soon as he began to talk, he revealed his eccentricity and weirdness. He spewed forth words like an incomprehensible rapper. Alvy thought of Alex’s patois as “word salad” or “Casey Stengel speak.” Alex’s internal clock was out of sync with the rest of society’s. He would come into the office to begin work at entirely unpredictable hours: he could start his day at 5 A.M. or 5 P.M.
Despite his unusual persona, Alex was an ideal patron for the band of computer wizards that Ed and Alvy attracted. They were completely independent of the dubious diploma-mill school in Manhattan. They could spend millions of dollars and hire people almost at will. They were never constrained by budgets or deadlines or even specific goals. They were entirely freewheeling. It was an extraordinary environment, a researcher’s dream. Money! Time! Talent! Freedom!
After Alvy was there for only two weeks, he talked with Ed about Alex Schure’s astonishingly laissez-faire attitude and his tenuous grasp of the technology.
“This guy doesn’t have the foggiest!” Alvy exclaimed.
“I know,” Ed said contentedly.
The bucolic setting only added to the pinch-me fairy-tale unreality of it all. When Alvy Ray Smith and David di Francesco went looking for a place to live near the research center, they saw a vintage British Vincent motorcycle parked in front of one of the neighboring estates. David had a passion for esoteric motorbikes, so they stopped to look. After chatting with the owners, they found themselves installed in the carriage house, living rent-free in a spacious three-bedroom apartment above the garage. It was the old chauffeur’s quarters from an era when chauffeurs lived surprisingly well. Their landlord, Justine McGrath Cutting, was a sister-in-law of David Rockefeller. Though in her sixties she wore bikinis around the estate and referred to her bearded brainy tenants as “my physicists.”
They lived on an estate, they worked on an estate, they did whatever they wanted. Although Ed would go home to his family at five o’clock, the rest of the bunch were young and single and stayed up late working and cavorting. Alvy was the joyous ringleader. In May 1977, the day that Star Wars opened, he drove his colleagues to Manhattan to see the movie. They were so captivated that they went back to the cinema to see another showing later that day. Star Wars was spectacular, but none of the special effects were created with a computer. George Lucas didn’t have the technology they were developing in the garage. No one did.
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COMPUTER GRAPHICS GURUS were almost ready to make very brief special effects for movies, but the idea of creating a feature-length film with computers was still way off. Part of the problem was that computer power was very expensive, and their art required overwhelming amounts of it. Here’s why: The basic trick was to simulate the complex effects of the rays of light as they ricocheted off all the tiny crevices and curves and corners of every finely detailed object in a picture. That’s essentially how the Old Master painters achieved their stunning illusions of realism back in the eighteenth century, and it was still the key to making a two-dimensional