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Comment by cdirkx | Hacker News Reader

Of topic, but reading the headline and the intro about Alvy Ray Smith I was half convinced this was going to be a satirical article about how he invented raytracing and that it is actually named after him; in similar vein as the “Running was invented in 1784 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice the same time” meme [0]

https://www.google.com/search?q=who+invented+running

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Yeah, it's funny how he actually ended up as a "ray smith" for a living. And even the "Alvy" part means something graphics related in some obscure language iirc. He wrote about that on his homepage, but I can't find it now - his homepage (at http://alvyray.com) is a bit... special.

Similarly, being good enough was invented by John B. Goodenough when he invented the lithium ion battery, which was good enough.

His first name is ALvy and he invented ALpha channel.

Porter+Duff's 1984 Compositing Digital Images paper paints a slightly different picture:

  Credit should be given to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and Ikonas Graphics Systems for the existence of an alpha channel as an integral part of a frame buffer, which has paved the way for the developments presented in this paper.

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf

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