Business 7 4"" '..e#0 ,, , • 11116=!1V- - - - • c ) weetheart o c 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 Sunset Strip 29536 Northnestern thy. • Southfield • (248) 357.4000 • Hours: Mon.-Sat. 10.5 THE HOLIDAYS MAY BE OVER BUT WE'RE STILL CELEBRATING AT and gallery EVERYDAY 7daY 20% off everyday 20% off everyday 20% off everyday 20% off everyday A LARGE SELECTION ON SALE NOW! Our Store Is Still Filled With Great Gifts For You and Your Friends! 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. MONDAY - SATURDAY 10AM - 5:30 PM THURSDAY 10AM-8PM • and gallery Your neighborhood store for twenty years! Items Under S25 Excluded. Special orders, previous sales and discounted items are not included. Thomas O'Dwyer is a writer for the Jerusalem Post Foreign Service.