Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know

Since Disney and Pixar merged their focus has been on making film franchises and the surrounding merchandise. So it's understandable that most people don't know that wasn't always their focus. When Jobs took over Pixar, he thought they were making a competitor to SGI. They had ambitions to sell not just Renderman licenses, but Renderman hardware. Jobs really wanted them to be a hardware company. They probably saw themselves as occupying the role NVIDIA fills today. The feature film animation studio was sold to Jobs as a way to market their technology, in order to sell more licenses and create the market which would want their (still theoretical) dedicated GPU hardware. Turns out the better play was making an animation studio that would rival and then eventually demolish and replace (via merger and integration) the iconic hand-drawn Disney animation. I suspect the heads of the animation studio within Pixar knew what they were doing though.