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Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems (Stanford University Network) launched in May 1982. John Seamons, who co-designed the Sun-1 ethernet interface, now worked in the Lucasfilm Computer Division nearby Ralph Guggenheim’s team:

When John arrived at Lucasfilm, he "evangelized" the SUN product line and we became one of their first customers.

The power of the UNIX based computers allowed the editing group to experiment with features that had been deemed impossible with the PERQ powered ‘Dodo’. The new Sun driven device became known as the Compeditor.

Meanwhile another Lucasfilm programmer had written a software tool that became critical to the editing group. Malcolm Blanchard had created a program that was able to bring together all of the disparate information, that related to film and video clips at Lucasfilm, into an accessible and ordered format. Built from the ground up the ‘SiBYL’ program could track a motion picture film’s progress from camera rushes through special effects and all post production stages.

Blanchard recalls:

The architecture of the asset management system I built for ILM consisted of a general-purpose database management system, a schema that described the data ILM needed managed and a user interface to interact with it. All of which I wrote from scratch. Sibyl was the DBMS. It was similar in function as today’s Oracle and Sybase systems, though those systems are much more scalable and robust than Sibyl ever dreamed of.

The ability to cross relate video clone time codes and link them to original film key numbers and edge numbers was critical to a future editing system. Guggenheim recalls:

Malcolm and I had been officemates in the early days of the Lucasfilm Computer Division and we remained close friends. I was very aware of his work on SiBYL. When he was about to wrap up his work on the ILM version of this database software, I enlisted him to come over and work with us and integrate it into the editing system

Such a tool could potentially solve Ralph Guggenheim's biggest headache, the ability to playback video clips with the same flexibility of film editing systems. He hoped that a re-purposed SiBYL could organize clips into ‘bins’ and then from there an editor could select more specific frames to be played in a 'sequence' or 'schedule'.

Blanchard adds:

SiBYL stayed the same. The work for Editdroid was to write a new scheme and user interface. The Compeditor​/Editdroid scheme was similar to ILM’s in that it described film clips. There was some additional information to allow accessing a clip on the electronic media and we needed to add the ability to describe the edit list. All that was pretty straight forward. The hardest part was designing and implementing the user interface.

The ILM interface was text based. Compeditor had a graphical interface and this was the first time I had worked with one. The possibilities were enormous and there weren’t any precedents to copy. I think I spent about a year, maybe two, working on the project. The vast majority of that time was working on the UI.

While the new UNIX based systems at Lucasfilm were better than the ageing Perqs, they created another problem to solve. Clark Higgins recalls:

You hit a button to stop or start the videodisc player and it would take a half second to respond. I knew this was going to be an issue with film editors and even video editors who were able to get instant feedback from their decks with the Sony BVE or Convergence systems. You need to get a tactile response to jogging and moving through frames and the UNIX operating system couldn’t deliver that.

George Lucas had allocated $10m in funding for the Computer Division but despite its ground breaking research, the team was far from creating commercial products. Bob Greber and Roger Faxon looked to hire a manager who could bring a business sense to the various research projects.Robert (Bob) Doris recalls:

I was back working at BCG when I received a call from a headhunter who said she represented a company in need of a division general manager. They wanted someone with a business and legal background. That person was to look at technologies that the company had developed in-house and work with existing staff to turn that work first into commercially viable products and then license it to third parties.

That sounded interesting but … they didn’t want to hire anybody with too much experience because that would be too expensive. Of course I didn’t know who the client was during the initial part of the conversation but the headhunter let me know eventually that it was a major film company.

To be honest I was a little incredulous because it didn’t seem to make sense. Here was a major film company looking to revolutionize film and sound editing technologies as well as re-invent computer graphics. I had enough experience in computers and technology from university and my own computer start up to know what was being done at that time in the film and computer industries. And that was relatively primitive.

I had also visited several Hollywood based post-production companies for a BCG consultancy job, so I had a basic understanding of that area too. What the headhunter was describing didn’t sound realistic, or achievable and I didn't want to join something that was potentially short lived. But my incredulity really came from the question “Which film company would want to invent a set of new film tools that would turn the industry on its head?”

I said to her “You have to tell me who the client is”

And the headhunter replied “Lucasfilm”

And I said “As in Star Wars Lucas- film?”

And she said “Yes”

I was annoyed that I didn’t guess it before being told. It had to be Lucasfilm. No mainstream studio would do this, make such changes to post-production. To make a complete transition to digital with effects and integrate sound so wholly. That’s when I asked “Can I come and see these projects we have been discussing?”

Doris made the trek to San Raphael and met Greber and project heads Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull.

I saw the stuff that Andy Moorer, Ralph Guggenheim and Alvy Ray Smith had created and was amazed. It was far ahead of anything anywhere in the world. From what I had seen during the BCG consultancy work in Hollywood, I could see how in a broad sense that these new tools could be adapted in the post production world.

I went from incredulous to very excited. And there was a little hint from the senior management, but never a commitment, that would consider spinning it out as a separate company at some point. And that hit my entrepreneurial button. I wouldn’t be the founder but very close to that.

Doris accepted an offer to return as General Manager. He recalls some thirty years later:

The short story is Bob Greber said to me“Here’s an office. Get to know people. Come back to us with your thoughts.”

Ralph Guggenheim adds:

He must’ve felt like a fish out of water when he first arrived, surrounded by all these PhD computer scientists who didn’t know how to balance a check book(!).

Doris continues:

The longer story is Lucasfilm wasn’t a typical corporate working environment. They did say, “Come in have a look at what we are doing, create a commercialization strategy for each of the projects (Sound, Editing and FX) but most importantly make an assessment of what needs to be done to get these tools to be used”. That was more important than selling systems, getting working tools. But.

Any important, and some not so important, decisions were made by George and/or Marcia Lucas. The management of Faxon and Greber was probably less independent than what I was accustomed to with BCG but there were far fewer restrictions on me at Lucasfilm than I had previously.

There was a general notion that we (at Lucasfilm) do not want to get into the business of making, marketing and selling hardware systems like Grass Valley or CMX. Greber, Faxon and of course George Lucas were very familiar with the notion of licensing things from the film industry.

And later on we would discover that the paradigm of putting a product ‘ in the can’, getting rid of the production staff and continue to sell the product (the film) or the licensed products (such as toys, soundtracks and games) did not extend to computer technology products.

If a product, in this case EditDroid, was successful you actually needed to add staff and keep improving the saleable product - in a sense the product was never ‘in the can’. But that was for us to find out in the months and years ahead. I took the job at Lucasfilm