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Down And Digital
SO% SAVINGS ON ALL
THOMAS O'DWYER
Special to The Jewish News
Name Brand Watches in Stock
(Seiko, Lassale, Citizen, Noblia)
Save an additional 10% & 20% on
our already discounted inventory
of diamonds, fashion jewelry, gold
bracelets, pottery and accessories.
Save Every Day on Unadvertised, In-Store Discounts.
WEBIRUB JEWELERS
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LOCATED IN
THE ORCHARD MALL
6385 ORCHARD LAKE ROAD
AT MAPLE
WEST BLOOMFIELD 48322
248.855.4488
2/6
1998
132
urt Akeley is not a house-
hold name like Bill Gates,
but the company he helped
co-found is a legend in "the
Valley" of silicon, and in Hollywood.
The company is Silicon Graphics, a
seriously heavy-duty designer and
maker of super-computing systems. But
it has applied the super-brains to such a
trivial pursuit as making you scream
when the dinosaurs rampage through
Jurassic Park.
Silicon Graphics technology has
changed the world of movies, of sci-
ence, education, military flight and
combat simulation. It has changed the
world in architecture and in product
design — almost every new car in the
world is designed on a Silicon Graphics
workstation using software pioneered by
Kurt Akeley and his teams.
They are a strange and fascinating
breed, these frontiersmen of the digital
high Sierras. They were in Ramat Gan
this week, their uniform blue denim
shirts carving high-energy swathes
through a phalanx of Israeli software
engineers. Israel and Germany were
chosen to host the second annual
European Forum for software develop-
ers.
This is the cutting edge of computer
science and the intensive two-day
forum included laboratory workshops
with world experts. Akeley himself, now
vice president in command of engineer-
ing for the modern dinosaur he created,
flew in from Mountain View, Calif. and
opened the show to a thunderous rock
beat and a swirling mass of gyrating sili-
con graphics on a huge screen.
Akeley seems typical of the new
kings of the new industry. He is absurd-
ly young and slim and carries vast intel-
lectual power and vision with ease and
humor. He is as excited about the
movie — and game-makers uses of
Silicon Graphics technology as he is
about the nuts and bolts of creating the
complex engines.
Akeley was a research adviser at
Stanford University before he co-found-
ed Silicon Graphics in 1982. He has led
the design teams for all the vast pro-
grams the company uses, including an
industry standard for creating 3-D
graphics known as OpenGL.
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Thomas O'Dwyer is a writer for the
Jerusalem Post Foreign Service.