His first art show was at the Stanford Coffeehouse. From 1969 to 1973 he was an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at New York University, under chairman Herbert Freeman, one of the earliest computer graphics researchers. He taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. While at Xerox PARC in 1974, Smith worked with Richard Shoup on SuperPaint, one of the first computer raster graphics editor, or 'paint', programs. Smith's major contribution to this software was the creation of the HSV color space, also known as HSB. He created his first computer animations on the SuperPaint system. In 1975, Smith joined the new Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology, where he was given the job title "Information Quanta". There, working alongside a traditional cel animation studio, he met Ed Catmull and several core personnel of Pixar. Smith worked on a series of newer paint programs, including Paint3, the first true-color raster graphics editor. As part of this work, he co-invented the concept of the alpha channel. He was also the programmer and collaborator on Ed Emshwiller's animation Sunstone, included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Smith worked at NYIT until 1979, and then briefly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Jim Blinn on the Carl Sagan television series. With Ed Catmull, Smith was a founding member of the Lucasfilm Computer Division, which developed computer graphics software, including early renderer technology. As director of the Computer Graphics Project, Smith created and directed the "Genesis Demo" in The Wrath of Khan, and conceived and directed the short animated film The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., animated by John Lasseter. At some point in the 1980s, a designer suggested naming a new digital compositing computer the "Picture Maker". Smith thought that the laser-based device have a catchier name, and came up with "Pixer", which after a meeting was changed to "Pixar". Smith and Catmull co-founded Pixar in 1986 with financing from Steve Jobs. After the spinout from Lucasfilm of Pixar, he served on the board of directors and was executive vice president. According to the Steve Jobs biographyiCon by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, Alvy Ray quit Pixar after a heated argument with Jobs over the use of a whiteboard. It was an unwritten rule that none other than Jobs was allowed to use it, a rule Smith decided to break in front of everyone after Jobs went "total street bully" on him and they ended up screaming into each other's face "in full bull rage". Despite being the co-founder of Pixar, Young and Simon claim that the company has largely overlooked his part in company history since his departure. For example, there is no mention of Smith on the Pixar website. He was for four years a member of the board of regents of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was instrumental in inaugurating the Visible Human Project. In 1991, Smith left Pixar to cofound Altamira Software, with Eric Lyons and Nicholas Clay. Altamira was acquired by Microsoft in 1994. Smith became the first Graphics Fellow at Microsoft in 1994. Pixar would go on to release Toy Story the following year and go public, helping to put Steve Jobs back at Apple. Smith retired from Microsoft in 1999 and is currently giving many talks, making digital photographs, doing scholarly genealogy, and researching technical history. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Since 2010, Smith is married to Alison Gopnik, author and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
