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Alembic was actually mostly Sony originally - ILM were mostly just a name on the ticket, and ILM started using the format because it was much more Katana-friendly (random access and lazy-loading) than their current format, and they were starting to use Katana at the time.

The first version of Alembic was pretty much just Sony's internal geometry format renamed.

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I'm not sure what you're referring to as "first version". Did you work on Katana at Sony, and are you referring to the choice to use HDF5?

The idea (a hierarchical organization of geom prims and transforms) was very similar between ILM and Sony. The library API organization (for better and worse) and hashing more more ILM but it was a pretty close collaboration all along the way.

Version 1.0.

I was at The Foundry while this was happening.

ILM struggled to use Katana with their existing file format.

I'd be worried if the idea wasn't similar - it was the implementation that mattered, and ILM's older format wasn't very good at random access and lazy loading (which were things needed for efficient use in Katana).

Alembic 1.0 was very close to Sony's Taco format rebranded.

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