I love that story. It illustrates perfectly what fascinated me so much about visual effects as a kid, and maybe also why I lost some of that fascination when CGI took over. Even though I was also very interested in computers back then (and I really loved Tron).

There was so much creativity involved and out of the box thinking about physics and time and optics, to craft something that in the end resulted in a nice optical illusion. Like a magic trick (interestingly, in German visual and special effects are (or were) also called "Filmtricks").

Now with CGI, everything is possible and paradoxically, that makes it more boring somehow. And sometimes practical effects still look better IMHO.