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.