Altamira Software

~ the eulogy ~

Alvy Ray Smith had already co-founded Pixar and run computer graphics research at Lucasfilm when he started his second company in 1991, in Mill Valley, California, with Eric Lyons and Nicholas Clay. Wikipedia says, without a citation, that the seed money came from Autodesk and that a later round came from venture investors and private individuals. The product was Altamira Composer, an image editor built on an idea that had not reached personal computers yet.

The idea was the sprite: an image that is not rectangular and carries its own edge. Sprites work because of the alpha channel, a concept Smith co-invented years earlier, and Composer treated a picture as a stack of independent objects instead of a grid of pixels you paint over. It entered the market in November 1993, on Windows, aimed at the people who composited images for a living.

Microsoft bought the company on 27 September 1994, ten months after the product shipped. No price was ever published. Smith went with it and became Microsoft's first Graphics Fellow, a title he shared with Jim Blinn and held until he resigned in October 1999. Altamira Software is three years old in the public record and has one product in it.

The code had a much longer life than the company did. It went into Microsoft Image Composer, and from there into Picture It! and PhotoDraw 2000, with Microsoft Digital Image Pro built on the same work. Smith's own account is that he guided that transfer himself.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a sprite was for ~

Object-based image editing sounds like a technicality until you try the alternative. In a pixel-grid editor, cutting a figure out of one photograph and putting it on another background means making a selection and then living with the halo around its edges for the rest of the image's life. A sprite carries a per-pixel alpha value, so a soft edge is soft because it is described that way rather than blurred afterwards. Composer put that on consumer hardware in 1993.

Thea Grigsby ran marketing and David Shantz of WildOutWest handled branding along with a series of image-object libraries. Those libraries were a large part of the pitch: you bought shapes and used them, the way clip art worked, except with edges that survived being moved.

~ the code outlived the name ~

Image Composer shipped in the box with FrontPage, and that bundle is how the Altamira idea arrived in Turkey. Around 1999 and 2000, building a web page here mostly meant using whatever Microsoft had included, and Image Composer's sprite compositing was often the only thing on the machine that could drop a non-rectangular object onto a background without a staircase of pixels around its edge.

Nobody using it had any reason to know the word Altamira, or that the person behind the window had helped start Pixar. The software was simply there, next to FrontPage and the GIF Animator, in a folder you opened because it came with the thing you actually wanted.

Microsoft stopped bundling Image Composer with FrontPage in 2001, two years after Smith left, and he has spent the decades since writing the history of the field rather than shipping more of it. His company's Wikipedia article carries a banner asking for citations, and the only hard date in it comes from Microsoft's own record of what it bought.

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