To me one of the oddest things about all this is that a lot of people think about the noise function, and nobody really thinks about where shaders come from.
I am glad that I came up with the noise function, and it’s incredibly useful. I use it every day.
But my real contribution to the field from that time was introducing procedural shaders. When I presented that work during a session at Siggraph 1984, some people from Pixar were in the audience.
After the Pixar folks saw what a full shader language could do, they pivoted from Shade Trees (essentially a fixed expression parser) to what eventually became Renderman — a fully functional shader language that became an industry standard.
But the ripples spread even wider than that.
More tomorrow.