Mickey Mantle (the other one) on Developing for the First Engineering Workstations

We catch up with Mickey W. Mantle and trace how early computer graphics hardware and software paved the way for modern CAD workstations, 3D visualization, and engineering design tools. Along the way, we talk candidly about chaotic product cultures, what good engineering management looks like, and how AI is changing both code and careers faster than most teams can track. 
• Mickey and I at IMSI. He came from Broderbund. 
• Why IMSI felt like the hardest job and what global teams demand 
• Lessons from How to Manage Unmanageable Groups and building without specs 
• AI hype, LLM limits, and why physical AI matters for engineering 
• The University of Utah’s outsized role in computer graphics history 
• Evans & Sutherland workstations, early CAD customers, and real-world use cases 
• The vector-to-raster shift and how cost beat perfect lines 
• Digistar and the rise of digital planetariums and dome experiences 
• Pixar, Steve Jobs meeting dynamics, and what RenderMan unlocked 
• Vibe coding, maintainability risk, and advice for new developers 

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Roopinder 0:08

Hello and welcome to the History of CAD podcast. My name is Roppinder Tara and I will be your host. On this podcast, we will explore the untold stories behind the tools that shape modern engineering and design. Each episode features conversations with the pioneers of computer-aided design, the innovators who built the software, and those who worked alongside them or observed or reviewed their work. This is the other Mickey Mantle, not the baseball player. Mickey and I knew each other at IMSI Software, where I worked on the TurboCAD division and Mickey was a CTO. Mickey is worked on in Evans and Sutherland as one of the first CAD workstations. He currently is promoting a book called How to Manage Unmanageable Groups. Hopefully, I'm not a chapter in his book, but let's see. Mickey was always the voice of reason, a stable force in a tumultuous company, as it turned out. IMSI is not mentioned in your in the IEEE article that I used as background for this. So wondering if this was a mission by choice. It's been a long time, my friend. It has been. Good to see you again. Initially I wanted you to be on the show to talk about. It's called the history of cat, and I talked to people who have had a lot to do with cat or at least are interested in it.

Mickey Mantle 1:31

I did go up and chat, look through your uh LinkedIn, see what you've been up to. So I kind of caught up on that. There's a lot of a lot of words in there, huh?

Roopinder 1:40

A lot of words in there. A lot of words. It's been all about words since I left IMSI. Yeah, it's been uh too much of our words. You know, I'm pretending to be a journalist now.

Mickey Mantle 1:51

I think so uh so yeah, and uh TenLinks links. How long did TenLinkss go? That's where I lost touch with you at TenLinks.

Roopinder 1:58

When I left IMSI, I went full time to TenLinks, which was more or less a signpost, internet signpost

From CAD Software To CAD Media

Roopinder 2:05

to CAD companies, uh CAD content. TenLinks had a newsletter and had a website. Most people knew it by newsletter. It's probably how you kept in touch with me, but through the newsletter, because everything any of the news about CAD, we would try to report on it. And then I went uh then I went on to engineering.com, which was and maybe still is one of the biggest uh engineering software-related media companies that I left them to. They got bought out, and then I left them to do my own thing, which I should have done yeah, I gotta say, I should have done years ago, because I only joined engineering.com to talk to help engineers with software. And uh I wasn't really getting to do that at engineering.com. It was all about writing for what the advertisers wanted. So it didn't didn't play well to me. So but I lost track of you after IMSI, which by the way, Vicky's not mentioned at all in this computer graphics article that I was reading about you as yeah. So is that just uh is that a mission by choice or by accident? Well, it was it was a brief stop, I was a it was, wasn't it? It was. I I wondered how, especially after reading this, all you had done with other companies, how on earth did they even manage to snag you for such an inconsequential post?

Mickey Mantle 3:36

It was a matter of the confluence of events.

Roopinder 3:39

Yeah.

Mickey Mantle 3:40

First of all, I uh decided that I wanted to leave Broderbund, which was really right across the road almost. Yeah, you know, and uh I I didn't like the CEO that came in. They hired a CEO whose his claim to fame was he was in charge of Kraft Cheese. Oh wow and so he considered himself a brand manager and he just knew nothing about computers. And I said, I don't think there's a future here for this company. And so I wanted to go somewhere, and the internet was just hitting. And when I talked to Martin about that, I mean that was where his focus was almost to a halt. And so with the international uh offices and everything, I thought it sounded like an interesting thing. And it was, it was, but it's the hardest place. I've worked harder there than I worked than anywhere else in my life, and I've worked hard all my life.

Roopinder 4:35

That IMSI, that was the toughest stage.

Mickey Mantle 4:40

Because all these offices in Russia and India had to be up almost 24-7 for.

Roopinder 4:47

Yeah, and yeah, you're a whole, I think all your developers pretty much, except for that loose gang from South Africa, were all in the Russians, which I yeah.

Mickey Mantle 4:59

They had a handful of uh others, you know, scattered around the world, people that I got to know. And I actually thought it was a great experience learning about how to manage people uh overseas or not manage them as the case may be. Uh, and so I I actually enjoyed the experience, but when the uh the news came down, I was not disappointed.

Roopinder 5:26

Yeah, the news came down that you were leaving?

Mickey Mantle 5:29

Well, you know, the the headlines in the newspapers and everything.

Roopinder 5:34

Oh, yeah, yeah, that was something. That company blew apart. It was like all about the internet, and I think they even wanted to change their name to have dot com in it. I I think he tried, but he it never went.

Mickey Mantle 5:48

Yeah.

unknown 5:49

Yeah.

Mickey Mantle 5:50

And now the only thing that really survives, of course, is TurboCAD is still going.

Roopinder 5:56

TurboCAD is still going strong. I think our our friends have all left though. I I don't know if Bob's still there. Bob, but yeah, Martin left. Well, I think Martin left rather quickly afterwards. Yes. Bob Mayer, I think, was hanging on there for a long time at a little office.

Mickey Mantle 6:11

And so was Jeff. Or oh, Bob, actually. I went down and talked to Bob about a year and a half ago about something else. And he was just retiring at that point.

Roopinder 6:22

Yeah. Right, yeah. I think uh he wanted to retire. I talked to him also, and I he wanted to get out, I think. So there's nobody left there now, I think. So, but it's still functioning, still selling TurboCAD.

Mickey Mantle 6:35

I don't know who's I think Soft Dev is still in the works in Russia.

Roopinder 6:40

Uh, okay, okay. Yeah, well, that's something. All right, but it doesn't really rate a mention when you when you go through all of all of the things you've done, huh?

Mickey Mantle 6:50

Yeah, yeah. I had a word limit as well. There's lots of things I didn't mention. Yeah, I I didn't mention another one that a company you might know about, which is FormTech, is a very diff different kind of CAD that I was at for a year as well. So that was also a good experience for me for lots of reasons, but I I left there to join Pixar.

Roopinder 7:12

Uh huh. So the working hard part at IMSI, that was more or less just having to stay up around the clock, or was it an unmanageable group of people? Well, the Russia side was great. That was no problem. Oh, okay. Yeah,

Why IMSI Was So Hard

Roopinder 7:25

yeah. The management on this side. Now tell me about your book. It's called How to Manage the Unmanageable, right? Are you talking mostly about the people or that that the technology changes so fast?

Mickey Mantle 7:37

Well, it's it's all sorts of things, you know. How do you develop products without good specs? Which happens all the time. Uh and of course, how do you manage burning cats? Which is what the title of the book started out to be that way before the it became uh cliche. Uh my co-author and I have been working on it for a long time. And so we published it in 2000, but been working on it since 2000. So it took a long time to percolate. But uh the whole process, uh, we felt like there wasn't a good book out there that was like a mentor to engineering manager, and this tries to do that, although quite frankly, with AI, everything is upside down.

Roopinder 8:22

It has turned everything upside down, hasn't it? It has. I mean, the same way.

Mickey Mantle 8:27

I've been I've been trying to work hard to follow it, and it's almost impossible to follow at the pace it's going, even if you can work almost full-time at it. And with AI now is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, how do you manage that? You know, and how do you actually control that? And I still haven't got my head around it, and I don't think anybody has done a good job, but there's a there's uh a lesson to be learned in there, a lot of them.

Roopinder 8:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's practically impossible. I know, trying just trying to cover it and just trying to cover what it's doing in uh in our field, if I can call engineering and science, engineering and design software in a field. Uh, that's almost impossible because it's changing so quickly. The perceptions are changing, and new companies are forming, and uh new people are getting into the act. We just I talked on the on the show. I talked to a uh person who was 19. He's 19, he's still in college, and he got $3 million to start a AI company, CAD company. So Parth Meta is his name, and his make his tree is the as a company. But uh can you imagine that could never have happened before, like a 19-year-old because just because he's got AI, uh, not just because AI. I mean, the product has looked pretty impressive and he's pretty impressive.

Mickey Mantle 9:46

Uh-huh.

Roopinder 9:47

But uh, but yeah, people are now companies are almost like forcing themselves to invest whether on on very limited claims, or I don't even know, if part of a business plan. You know, it's it's the cr the fever is upon us. Yeah, and very difficult to cat keep up. I think people in the industry can't keep up because once you're immersed in the industry, you're doing something that's very specific, and somebody else is doing something else that's probably going to obsolete your technology. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But do you have have you come away with anything that you know, all the initial interest that fever was all about LLMs? Have you done much to study uh physical AI? Because I think that's probably more applicable to design and engineering software.

Mickey Mantle 12:03

No, I haven't I've been mostly on the software side looking at it.

Roopinder 12:07

Yeah, that's where we see a lot of things happening because LLMs, of course, are about language, but uh you know, we we have to be deal with physics, the mass, forces, you know, the just the fact that software, you know, can't like a human uh a robot in software can't well go right through the object that he's trying to pick up because there's no sense of mass or uh and that can't happen in real life. So I mean like what the heck? Why can't why can't software figure why can't people figure this out? And that's where AI, physical AI is supposed to come in and take care of that. And when uh Jensen Huang talks about it, you know, he says, Oh, that's gonna be great, that's gonna make robotics, humanoids happen, is the physical aid. Yeah, yeah. So it's so interesting. I mean, I thought about at one point after after I left engineering.com, I figured, oh, this would be a good time to retire. But my God, there's so much happening and so much that needs to happen. I can't I probably feel the same way. It's like this is not a good time to get out of the business. This is just the most exciting time ever, since even since the I would say not since the internet happened to us, right? And this is a very exciting time. But yeah, I can totally wait. I cannot keep up. It's a yeah. So besides writing and promoting your book, I don't know if you're on talk shows or anything besides besides this one. But are you uh Mickey, you've got you've existed. I've got to say that correct me if I'm if your perception is wrong, is behind the scenes genius behind a lot of these things that uh other people take credit for. I have most notably maybe Steve Jobs in Pixar, right? I you were probably a big part. Tell me what part you played in that technology in Pixar. And then I want to go back to talk about what you what you did at maybe you could summarize what you did at Evans and Sutherland, too, because that's you know, when you talk about history of CAD, it starts with Evans and Sutherland on their machines, right? But in the history of CAD, that's history of CAD that uh Steve Weisberg wrote, I'm not sure he mentions you at all.

Mickey Mantle 14:20

Probably not. So let me go back to Stephen a little further. So I just happened to be at the University of Utah when I was started as a computer graphics program. I joined in the very first year of it. I'm not sure it lasted more than about a year, I might add. And uh there are several other people in there, like Ed Catmull from Pixar, founded Pixar, and Henry Fuchs, uh professor now at UCUNC, Fred Park, professor at CNM, I believe. And lots of other people, some I worked with at ANS labor. And that introduced me to computer graphics, and I didn't realize how unique it was at the time, although there had been a uh Scientific American article about Ivan talking about that that I jested, but I just didn't appreciate it as much as I should have. I appreciated it much later.

Roopinder 15:10

But at this point, was the screen just basically like a like a Etch- a- sketch? Like it was just making lines and circles, and

Managing Unmanageable Teams In Tech

Roopinder 15:19

and that was it.

Mickey Mantle 15:20

But it wasn't well they had two types of displays. They had a line drawing display driven by a CRT, you know, uh, so you do lines. Uh wasn't 3D, it was just 2D. Um and uh they actually had a Stanford mouse. I was using a mouse in 1970, long before they emerged anywhere else. So uh, and at that year, I was at the University of Utah. Uh they were also the one of the four nodes on the ARPA net at that time. So Utah was pretty advanced for the time. That's partially because Ivan Sullivan was former director of ARPA. So he had all the right connections. So he went to be a professor at the University of Utah.

Roopinder 16:04

And uh computer revolution, it's kind of graphics revolution, at least started in Utah.

Mickey Mantle 16:09

Oh, it did, no question about it. Uh and so having taken courses from Ivan and enjoyed computer graphics, I I my first job out of college wasn't computer graphics, although they told me it was. It was actually a user interface on a CRT with uh you know 20 lines and 80 columns. So I had to do graphics for that for a user interface and was actually ended up being the lead programmer for a three-acre uh warehousing materials handling system with very primitive robotics, but robotics of the time, which would automate the uh retrieval and storage of parts for aircraft rework for the Navy. And so that was a pre, and that was I learned so much there. I had to, it was like doing from a fire hose, learning how to do dropped handlers and and control devices, uh, you know, acres away.

Roopinder 17:08

And uh tell me about resolution again because I think Etch -a -Sketch has better resolution than what you just described there.

Mickey Mantle 17:16

Yeah, I I think it was.

Roopinder 17:18

Yeah, what uh what uh language were you using to create your computer graphics programs in Fortran and assembly? Oh okay, okay.

Mickey Mantle 17:28

It was driven by PDP Towns. Okay.

Roopinder 17:31

Was C C a thing even then?

Mickey Mantle 17:34

Oh, C was decades later.

Roopinder 17:37

Oh, okay, okay. So Fortran. If I remember taking Fortran classes at school.

Mickey Mantle 17:43

I don't think any of them had broken in at that point.

Roopinder 17:45

Uh E&S had a commercial workstation product at that time or how how close we had several.

Mickey Mantle 17:53

And I think I put a picture in that article, showed four different generations of displays I worked on there.

Roopinder 17:59

Uh the PS300 system 2, PS multi picture system, PS300, PS340.

Mickey Mantle 18:06

Well I spent a lot of years at E&S and uh well, along with a a cohort of mine, we wrote all the software for the picture systems for several years. And uh it was a great experience for me because I got to talk to people around the world. I went to give the training courses around the world and explained computer graphics and 3D computer graphics to people around the world. And in Salt Lake City, they were based in Salt Lake City.

Roopinder 18:31

So you were the person actually wrote that code. Me and me and another guy. Okay. Do you ever put did you ever put like an Easter egg or something in there to identify yourself?

Mickey Mantle 18:42

Or yeah, I actually my name was in all the source code because it was okay, all right. And we kept a change list in the code, so all our changes were in there.

Roopinder 18:52

When you do that sort of thing, do you ever say the other Mickey mantle?

Mickey Mantle 18:55

I I encountered that quite a bit.

Roopinder 18:57

Okay, you've had that going on. Yeah, yeah. All right, so wow, so the man behind the scenes, man behind the screen, I should say, all the Fortran code. Uh those are these hardware workstations that went for, I want to say $25,000, but is that am I?

Mickey Mantle 19:14

No, they started at 80, and that was in 1971. Uh 73, excuse me. 1973, they were $80,000. And that was down from their original one, which was called an LDS one, kind of a play on words by Ivan, uh uh, which was much more than that, but they only made a few of them. And these that we actually made many, many of these systems.

Roopinder 19:38

Who could afford that? Was it like was it like DARPA, like the defense agencies or oh, yeah, but also a lot of universities with grants. Universities' grants.

Mickey Mantle 19:48

As a matter of fact, the the work that's been done on molecular modeling was all started on our equipment. In fact, some of the people who were deep in that field are still some of my good friends. One at the University of California at San Francisco, Tom Farron, just gave me an email last night telling me he was going to have an endowed chair named after him there. So they've been uh quite an impact in the world. He created a molecular modeling program, originally developed on the Evans and Sutherland's systems and later on Silicon Graphics and other systems, which is used prior across the world for doing 3D molecular model. And now with uh with the AI doing some of the design, you know, and figuring out which proteins can be folded in what direction, being able to visualize it is becoming even more important.

Roopinder 20:43

Sure, yeah. All right, and so was CAD an accidental use or a non-intended use?

Mickey Mantle 20:50

It was one of the primary customers. We sold equipment to McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed. I remember we sold the systems to uh Pratt and Whitney for doing turbine blade design.

Roopinder 21:04

Oh, okay. All right, so big aero was using it. Uh I want to say they would I first heard of big aero using CATIA. Would that CATIA have been a program being used, or is that down the road a little bit?

Mickey Mantle 21:16

That's down the road quite away.

Roopinder 21:18

Okay, they're

AI Fever And Physical AI Questions

Roopinder 21:19

using probably their own homemade software the years. All homemade okay, graphics engines were supplied by you guys. Interesting. Right now, when I entered into the CAD scene, it was later, maybe 10 years, 11 years later. You said 73 was about this time. So 10 years by that time, they had the workstations had gone down to $25k. That's where that my memory comes in. And uh what was happening at Evans and Southern? Was it still by 10 years later? Was it still a viable company?

Mickey Mantle 21:52

Oh, yeah. They they actually had two branches, and one was much more viable than the other one. Uh one that made the displays was called the interactive systems, and they had simulation systems which did three real-time visual display systems for pilot simulation. Oh, okay. And those systems were very expensive. They didn't for other applications. Well, they did one for uh NASA shuttle arm training. Uh-huh. Uh they did one for the New York Harbor Simulator for harbor pilots that had five screens around a makeup of a bridge. And you it was all real-time shaded imagery.

Roopinder 22:36

Uh-huh. So, besides the limitations of your screen resolution, what else, what other what else was challenging during this time?

Mickey Mantle 22:43

Well, how to how to display pixels? Actually, for us, we didn't turn to raster until much later, like maybe 10 years. It was the first time we made a raster display. Although Evans and Sutherland did make one of the very first video frame buffers, which was purchased by NYIT to do animation movies back there for Ed Catman. So uh there was there were a lot of raster stuff going on, but it was mostly on the other side of the house, full of simulation systems, other than the very first. Early ones, which were actually done with vector line drawing displays showing just lights on runways.

Roopinder 23:24

Okay.

Mickey Mantle 23:25

But the later ones, all shaded images, full scale.

Roopinder 23:28

Okay. So it went from all every image being vector to every image, every image being rasterized. Okay. And that was it. There was a transition there when that happened. Why tell me sorry? Sorry, this is a basic question, but tell me why raster became standard, why it's now.

Mickey Mantle 23:46

So you can kind of follow the the point where it was de facto by the history of silicon graphics. So they came out with a raster display, and we poo-pooed it, of course, at Evan Silent because it had jaggy lines. But of course, the cost was so much less that they became very popular. And it was became one of the very first integrated workstations with graphics. And they, of course, were very successful for a while, and then they just ran out of steam.

Roopinder 24:19

Yeah. Oh, interesting. So as a purist, you would probably value this precision, the accuracy of a line drawn from one point to the other, and they could do it. They could do a worse line, but it took less dollars to get it.

Mickey Mantle 24:35

I was a big big advocate of doing that. I wasn't really proving it, but the company certainly had an elitist point of view, I think. So I don't think David Evans actually was in it for the money ever. Even though it was funded by venture money from from Venrock, uh Rockefeller money. Right. He really created it more like a uh university and doing things that he wanted to do rather than what was the most profitable or anything like that.

Roopinder 25:07

So eventually, though, Evans and Sutherland of the company went adopted and embraced raster technology, right? Okay. And then still was still viable, but now it had competitors. Silicon Graphics, you mentioned Tektronix, I think.

Mickey Mantle 25:23

By the time I I came under the scene, Tektronix was also Tektronix was never really a 3D competitor.

Roopinder 25:30

Okay, okay. And uh and I think a lot of the uh Intergraph, Intergraph came in with clipper, the clippers as well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Didn't a lot of companies were making their own work workstations to try maybe compete with ANS. We had an applicant system, they I think they had their own proprietary hardware. Um used the deck quite a bit. The deck as a main mini mini, and you worked with DEC, didn't you? I think there's some mention of oh yeah, yeah.

Mickey Mantle 25:59

We we worked, we did a lot of work with DEC, but DEC nearly had never had any 3D capability.

Roopinder 26:06

Okay, so basically they were they were the computing engine and you supplied the the workstations. Okay, so you mentioned in

Utah Graphics Origins And Early Hardware

Roopinder 26:14

this article I read I read on trip by IEEE that that was the happiest, most productive time of your life, any of this.

Mickey Mantle 26:21

Yeah, it was it was a great time, yeah. Well I mean I had a lot of great times, but uh that was clearly the episode. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know whether you know whatever happened at the Sutherland though. Tell me. One of my cohorts and I one day went down to the local planetarium to just look around and took lunch off and went down there and I bought a star catalog book and gave it to this guy. And he went off and and digitized the star catalog book and put up a 3D view of the uh stars. And of course, by using the magnitude you could approximate and the type of star you could approximate the distance. Uh and they went off. He and another guy there, another engineer, uh, created a system called Digistar. And uh it eventually became a system from Evans and Sutherland, took a lot of work to finally get it done, uh, and shipped uh digital planetariums, finally bought Spitz. Do you remember Spitz? They did uh planetariums, planetarium domes, so integrated everything in together, and uh until about 2001, two tiny one, uh they were in business selling digital planetariums and the only four people in the world doing it and were very successful, and they continue to do that today, although they were acquired in, I think it was 2021, uh, by a company called COSM, who took their dome technology and are making a point, they're making entertainment venues with domes, much like the sphere in Las Vegas, but more approachable, cheaper pricing, and not as immersive, though they do some immersive works.

Roopinder 28:22

The uh Las Vegas sphere.

Mickey Mantle 28:24

You must have been looking at that and remembering that that's I had to go up and see the Eagles and then went back to see the Wizard of Oz. I I've been loving 3D graphics forever. So how could I not? It was, by the way, a mind-blowing experience to see the Eagles there.

Roopinder 28:41

Uh-huh, uh that's amazing. Uh, yeah, yeah, you're like Mr. 3D graphics. Okay, now now you went to okay, you left there. Did you go right to Pixar after that?

Mickey Mantle 28:51

A brief stop with this company called Formative Technologies for a year until Pixar called me. I'd actually been talking to Pixar before I left and they weren't ready. And when they were ready, I uh jumped to Pixar.

Roopinder 29:04

Okay. I remember reading uh the book Jobs. And uh did you read it? What the one by uh Walter Isaacson? I in that book it mentions that jobs was famous for taking other people's ideas and then giving and projecting them as his own. Did that that happen with you?

Mickey Mantle 29:26

Did they anything that you not exactly, but yeah, I did learn. I used to meet with him almost once a week. Me and the staff of Pixar would go down to Next and meet with Steve. So we'd have an hour, hour and a half conversation with him every week. So I got got to learn some of his foibles and quirks. But one of the things I noticed was that if you're in a meeting and it was kind of brainstorm meeting with Steve, yeah, you never threw out your first, your best idea first. You always threw out a worse idea because you knew no matter what it was, he was going to change it. Okay, and then he'd follow on with that, something to that, and then it would be adopted.

Roopinder 30:08

Oh, really? There was a way to manage Mr. Jobs, huh?

Mickey Mantle 30:12

Well, I won't say I learned how to manage him. Yeah, it was truly managing the unmanageable.

Roopinder 30:17

Pixar, it I recall meeting in in the article that uh you left when you realized the company was only going to do animation. Do I remember that correctly? Like that was I read into that, but it wasn't serious enough work for you.

Mickey Mantle 30:33

Is that what so to me? I like developing interesting things. And I couldn't see them doing a lot more interesting things with graphics. We'd already just finished the Renderman project, and that was pretty special, but uh that was just more about how to make graphics as opposed to use it. Of course, I didn't realize at the time how the special effects would take over the movies, quite frankly.

Roopinder 31:01

Hey, tell tell us what Renderman is.

Mickey Mantle 31:03

Oh, Renderman is a 3D graphic specification that it was used to create all the uh 3D special effects, and and it was very excellently designed by a team of Pixar very smart guys who put in a way to do exactly what you want to do by a language they call the shading language to control how each pixel would be presented at the end. So you could do all kinds of things that you could you wouldn't have to go back and rewrite code or anything to do it. And so uh it kind of drove the ability to do special effects. As a matter of fact, Pixar did the very first special effects in the world for Star Trek three, and then that helped spur the design of uh and the interest of of George Lucas, of course, in special effects, and that that continued on. That work continued there, and then in about 1970 or 85, at least this Renderman specification.

Roopinder 32:10

Okay, you said that special effects was kind of killing off your maybe what you wanted to do. Tell me how that is, because I thought that was all computer graphics.

Mickey Mantle 32:22

It is okay, it is, but somehow, and I I won't try to justify it, but I had uh a desire to be more a part of the computer industry because I felt like that was more the animation world, it was more niche than that. That turned out to be much bigger than that. Uh, I couldn't see that at the time, but Disney Buying Pixar was never never in the back of my mind when I was there, I'll tell you. Okay, okay.

Roopinder 32:50

All right, good. All right, so I think at when you had left, had how what was the condition of Steve Jobs at the time? And because he because he died later

Evans & Sutherland Workstations For CAD

Roopinder 32:59

of liver cancer, right?

Mickey Mantle 33:00

Was he still that was decades later? When it was 2011, and I left Pixar in 1991.

Roopinder 33:10

I would propose an idea for you, like it was about TurboCAD. You would just listen and and uh I found it very agreeable, right? But uh I didn't have to do much pitching, uh, which was which was nice. Uh and then went off to uh the Russian team, visited Russia, and told them everything I wanted to do. And you went along with it just fine, right? It was like it without any issues. I don't know if there was anything else you remember about that, but uh yeah, but everybody else, like everybody else, I think, was uh didn't quite know what to make of their own products other than let's just price the price it to like dollars, right? They weren't a technology company, they were like a sales company with direct marketing, right?

Mickey Mantle 34:01

It clearly what Martin yeah uh DNA was, but uh it was it was a shock for me having come from a company who did a lot of software products Broderbund, where I was for uh almost a decade, yeah. Um and was a very well-run company while the founders were still there and profitable and went public, and you know, it was a great place to work. Uh it would none of the chaos that you saw at IMSI. So I if I did anything, I tried to decrease the chaos.

Roopinder 34:40

Yeah, yeah, it was uh it was all seemed to to uh be the subject to I can relate it to the to the times right now politically. It all had to do with the whims of one man, a creative idea, one creative idea by the CEO, and then everybody would jump around trying to fulfill that idea. And the last idea, I think their fatal one, was uh let's do internet, it's we're a dot com now. Uh losing sense of like I thought TurboCAD was a very underrated product, diminished only by its low price, but but yeah, they they didn't have much interest in the unit, even though it was kind of their bread and butter. I remember going to Russia, I was very impressed by their technical ability, but uh I I remember I think it was you that might have said, I think they exist to create the next Pro/ E. They would they wanted to make their, you know, really use their skills, and all we wanted to do was make a next version of TurboCAD. I had wanted to make a uh AutoCAD, uh like do everything that AutoCAD could do, but at a fraction of the price. So yeah, but it I don't think either of us got a chance to do what we wanted to do at that company. No, yeah. Like I said, I I had a great, it's great learning experience. So now what are you doing? Promoting your book, which is second print?

Mickey Mantle 36:04

I had one more major stop along the way, which was uh this company called Gracenote, uh, which you probably didn't know, but I I started out as a musician in a rock and roll band in high school and college. And so music was always my first love. Computer graphics is second, and uh still is, as a matter of fact. And this company, Gracenote, uh, which you might tell has a musical twist with a Grace note in the name, we did was the first crowdsourced website in the world.

Roopinder 36:36

Ah, okay. That was in over in Berkeley, right? I think I saw it. That's right.

Mickey Mantle 36:41

Yeah, it was called CDDB at the time. Uh and changed the name to Grace Note later. And and finally they uh went into lots of different directions, embedded databases of content and media. Right. Um I had a lot of fun. I I was in charge of the entire development staff there, which was all over the world, and yeah, and uh had a great time as well. But uh to me, it's very it was still exciting. When I go rent a car, I'll uh you know turn on Sirius XM and they'll often come up with the uh album mark by Grace note.

Roopinder 37:16

So it's still going strong and yeah, yeah, he's still making a contribution. It was right across the was it across the street or within walking distance of Chat Cafe? Yeah, yeah, it was across the street. Across the street, right? I remember like hey, I should stop Port Street, which I I love that place. Every time I'd go, I'd see Grace. I'd say, I should just stop it and see Mickey. I don't know if he's there.

Mickey Mantle 37:39

Yeah, who would have known?

Roopinder 37:41

Yeah, yeah.

Mickey Mantle 37:42

Funny you didn't find me there. There was our lunch, that was our cafeteria. What was that?

Roopinder 37:46

Yeah, your cafeteria was well, literally.

Mickey Mantle 37:49

I mean, we what we walked for lunch.

Roopinder 37:52

Oh, I see, I see. Yeah, I will yeah, we might have crossed paths there. Very interesting. All right, uh so Mickey, where are you now? Where are you calling from?

Mickey Mantle 38:03

I retired from Grayson in 2011. Okay. I've been retired ever since, except for this little foray I did, which is I had a passion for a set of line of products that we developed in Broderbund called Living Books. Uh I went back and I licensed the rights to those titles, to the software, although they lost the source code and uh

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Mickey Mantle 38:29

re-implemented the software that would run these titles. Now, the software, the title content, which Broderbund had done, was all independent of the code. Okay. It had all about the animations and so forth. So these are redactive children's books, which I published for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, and uh did that for another dozen 10 years, 11 years, and sold the company off three years ago. And I still continue to sell consult for the company, sold it to a company called Zoom Platform, which owns the rights to a lot of applications or sell, not necessarily to develop. So they have their own store, but they also sell it on other platforms. We have distribution through people who install it on tablets to go into schools, their educational quality applications. Okay. And so I did that for another decade or more. Were you actually coding? Did you I actually didn't code that, but I hired the key people from Broderbund who did to re-develop the code.

Roopinder 39:42

So back to managing teams of software developers. So is that true nowadays AI is writing all the code? Like you don't, I don't know.

Mickey Mantle 39:49

No, it's not writing all the code, but it's writing a lot of the code. A lot of code, right?

Roopinder 39:54

So and then does vibe vibe coding. Have you have you kept up with that?

Mickey Mantle 39:58

Yeah, I have. And it's something else. I I don't quite quite understand all the vibe. Yeah, but certainly you can get a lot done with one individual today. Uh okay, yeah. I had somebody I worry about the maintainability in the long run. How do you make your product out of it? How do you, you know, but if you have small enough pieces that you can parcel out, AI can do the work. You can specify it.

Roopinder 40:25

Yeah, yeah. I had it explained to me by an executive at Software at uh SolidWorks, actually, and he like seemed to be almost, he gave the impression that he could on the spot create an application just by vibe coding. And it's like, well, that's pretty cool. Although he uh this was at CES, and uh it was very, very interesting. So who knows? Maybe even a dummy like me could code after that.

Mickey Mantle 40:52

So I've tried a few passes at it. Just trying to figure out how this stuff works. Uh new websites for sure.

Roopinder 41:01

Yeah, yeah.

Mickey Mantle 41:02

So I I had a surprise thing the other day when I don't really notice, but Anthropics source code is released. They had an analysis of some of the source code, and it was basically written in uh not a uh procedural language. I was shocked.

Roopinder 41:20

Wait, what does that mean with procedural language?

Mickey Mantle 41:22

It was written in it was is the name escaped me off the top of my head, but uh it it was basically not like C, if you will, not compiled code, but it was interpretive code. Oh, I see.

Roopinder 41:37

Okay, and that's an that's unusual. I mean well, for AI, we shocked about that, but yeah, yeah. So are we at a point where AI could write its own code for the next LLM or next physical?

Mickey Mantle 41:51

They say they're doing it already. That's how they're doing the each new Rev.

Roopinder 41:54

So which what would you say? I I don't know if you have children or grandchildren, how would you advise them? Like, should they get into software now, or should is this a you know, there's a time when it said that software was the profession, everybody had to

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Roopinder 42:09

get into software. Software is going to eat your lunch, I think people would say, right?

Mickey Mantle 42:13

Is that still a thing, or is like I I think I think knowing more about it than less is a good thing, but I wouldn't necessarily advise anyone to jump into just being a programmer today. Yeah, okay. Programming architects, there's things, you know, but how do you get there? How do you become one of those when you're not allowed to do all the programming now? It's one of the one of the challenges. There's a great article in ACM that just came out for April. It's an opinion article about how to put teams together so that you make sure you're still growing talent while you let AI do some the heavy lifting, you know.

Roopinder 42:53

Yeah. How do you get the right humans in there? And all the talk we hear is you don't you don't have to be half humans, you just have a bunch of AI agents and they're doing they're doing all your work. And uh, I don't think that's gonna work. It's not gonna work, I know. I think I still think there's a place for oversight somewhere. Yes, but how to tell young people where how to counsel them and what what to do, because a lot of the introductory jobs in development, they're not there anymore. It used to be like, okay, we thought they might go overseas for for it, but now it's like nobody, AI is doing so much of it. You know, big tech is laying off programmers. It's like, I don't know who's hiring anybody big who's hiring uh any of the big tech firms that are hiring uh low-level developers anymore.

Mickey Mantle 43:43

I I was studying this in some depth a little while ago. I I've got an uh an article I'm gonna publish one of these days. I went back and I used Claude to take and do some analysis for me on the job potential over the next five years. Right. They're losing jobs, and this is a worldwide study with uh 12 different countries up, you know, or programmers are going, and and it turns out the programming had one of the biggest hits of all the job categories, and there was probably a hundred different job categories and four programming ones, and so uh it was a very good thing. I I I I've been gonna get around to publishing, I just haven't got around to it.

Roopinder 44:25

Okay, all right. I'll I'll look for I'll look for that. Drop me a line when it gets published, that's very interesting. I will, I will. Okay. You're Napa now? You're living in

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Roopinder 44:34

Napa?

Mickey Mantle 44:35

I am. I live over in Napa. I lived in Marine for a long time for 30 years, 30 plus years. I moved here about seven years ago.

Roopinder 44:43

Oh, okay.

Mickey Mantle 44:44

In Novato, after I retired, uh my wife and I decided to plant a little vineyard in our backyard. We had enough space there to do it. And what I found was that I really didn't want to tend grapes. It's a lot of work. Growing grapes is a lot of work. I'd rather be around grapes.

Roopinder 45:03

Uh huh. Yeah, people don't realize it's farming. Growing grapes is farming. They have this uh romantic idea of making their own winemaker with grapes and uh so you're not you're just consuming wine. Growing the grapes, right?

Mickey Mantle 45:18

Yeah, I mean I'm even consuming less, unfortunately.

Roopinder 45:21

Oh no, oh no. Okay. I hope that's uh you're in good shape, Matt. Healthy? Okay, healthy. Yeah, okay. All right, good.

Mickey Mantle 45:29

Happy, healthy, and traveling and doing the things we like to do. Although still ain't paying too close attention to what's going on in the tech world.

Roopinder 45:39

Yeah, yeah. You must you must be if you're still subscribing to uh graphics journals. Still paying attention. All right, very good. Well, Mickey, it's been great to catch up. Nice to see you again. Been a long time.

Mickey Mantle 45:52

It has. And hopefully we're meeting each other in person sometime, Roopinder. It's been great to talk to you. Great talking to you too.

Roopinder 45:59

All right. All right, Vicki. Take care. Good rest of the day. Thank you. Bye-bye. This concludes this episode of the History of CAD podcast. Please join me in our next episode as we add to the rich history of design software. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or note someone who has stories to share, please let me know via email at roopinder at engtechnica.com. But please can sponsor an episode of the History of CAD. Get the details on our website, engtechnica .com/ sponsorship.