I first met John when he was giving a demo of an icon based GUI that he developed for the Computervision DCU, Display Control Unit. My GEEKy reaction was COOL!!! and my emotional reaction was "why won't management let us do stuff like that!" The DCU was a cutting edge framebuffer with a little bit of graphics smarts attached to it. A bit ahead of its time in 1982. Computervision also developed a GPU Graphics Processor Unit and a 32-bit CPU that were also ahead of their time, but, the management just saw them as tools to sell the CADDS software. The software outlived the hardware, as it did at so many companies.
In 1984, Computervision was Sun Microsystems first large customer and we also manufactured the Sun machines that CV sold. I was tasked with creating a WIMP GUI and I helped hire John and Robert Roessler as contractors. We holed up in a tiny office in the Dolly Parton building for months and months. John was doing the design and coding, Robert churning out most of the code and I was designing icons, writing code and mostly making sure the company would be able to build and maintain the software when John & Robert left. The UIM was similar the early Macintosh GUI, but smaller in scope. I think we were writing to the raw frame buffer. This was a bit before Windows was introduced and the X Window system was still a research tool at MIT. The UIM was a very solid product and used by some of CVs applications for many years.
After that, we would meet at SIGGRAPH every year. SIGGRAPH started in 1974 and was the preeminent conference of computer graphics. Eventually, the field of computer graphics diverging into games, entertainment, scientific and informational visualization. The computer graphics hardware vendors that powered it faded away as NVIDIA and a few other made high powered graphics a commodity. If John & I had not met before, we would definitely meet on Tuesday at 7:30 in line for the first showing of "the movies", aka the Electronic Theatre. It was the demo reel of the very best computer animation by the pioneers of computer graphics. First it geeky technique things and flying logos and then stories. My guess is that we kept that standing date for close to 10 years. We saw Luxo Jr. together, played crowd controlled ping pong, and saw cutting edge graphics enable the realm of scientific visualization. Many of those years I would be working in the trade show for Stardent, OKI and VolumePro. It was a great place for John to arrange meetings with various movers and shakers.
After the movies, we good go out for dinner and then wander the streets of whatever city was hosting SIGGRAPH well into the early morning. We would process all the new technologies we had seen at the trade show and the Emergency Technologies exhibition. It was an especially rich environment with all of the latest cutting edge computer graphics gizmos. We were 1/2 between the Dick Tracy watch and the Apple watch. We had some wild conversations about what was coming and we lived to see it become real. Those are treasured memories.
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