Some Computer Graphics history ‘before’ Computers
Good day to you all. This is post #3 for the new AstroVirtual Inc. blog.
I’ve been in the Computer Graphics and Imaging business for virtually a lifetime. When I designed and built the HP 1300A in 1966, the first directed-beam graphics display commercially sold by any computer vendor, people had little idea what to do with it. I worked for Hewlett-Packard, which at the time only designed, built, and sold scientific instrumentation. HP was by far the leading scientific instrumentation company in the world then producing nearly half of the world’s electronic instrumentation. I worked in the Oscilloscope division, which was about one-twentieth of the company, in a market that Tektronix dominated.
One small part of HP, though, was focused on the idea of an “Instrumentation Controller” which was introduced on November 7, 1966 as the 16-bit HP 2116A mini-computer. It displayed ‘answers’ on an ASR-33 teletype printer.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/50th-anniversary-of-the-hp-2116-minicomputer/
In spring 1967, HP introduced the HP 9100A Desktop Calculator, the world’s first “Personal Computer’, with a small 5” CRT display to show three rows of numbers dynamically.
The inventors of both computer products had worked in the oscilloscope laboratories, so they ‘knew’ about CRT displays. Nonetheless, one group only chose an automated typewriter (industry standard) and the other chose a tiny television raster-scan TV display.
HP instruments, in common with all other electronic instrumentation of the world, used Nixie tubes or d’Arsonval Meters, to show one-dimensional numbers. You had to read a meter dial, a sequence of numbers, or a set of measurements, to get a meaningful answer.
EKGs were new to the medical field, and they required a graphical printer, which was a major improvement over the ASR-33 teletype rows of numbers or letters, but no graphics.
I wasn’t trying to build a computer display…
Some of our divisions were modelling 2-D and even 3-D plots of instrumentation data, and I figured that a dynamic CRT display would improve their ability to do that.
Here were some of our ideas:
Bandpass filter response from 1 to 2I MHZ showing 1 MHz comb markers positioned exactly on the vertical line of the graticule.
Carcinogens
in orange juice concentrate
Graphical Computer Displays
HP’s customers, not HP designers or sales teams, figured out that these displays had value with the new computers. And so did medical teams, and even the space program. The first significant move was by a small medical team in Utah, Beehive Medical Inc. Their co-founder was the first cousin of my U.S. Forestry teammate, Irv McQuarrie. Irv told him about my unit, and they bought one to experiment with bedside monitors. An HP version, HP 1309A, had eight channels, and was used by Dr. Denton Cooley for the world’s first artificial heart transplant monitor. Beehive was successful with this display, and redefined their company to become one of the early Computer Terminal companies.
Without forethought, the HP 1300A became the display of choice for early instrumentation systems using the HP computer, The 1968 HP Annual Report showed several installations, never mind the fact that the HP sales teams had not sold them in that configuration.
What became significant, though (entirely unplanned by our team), was that a young intern at Beehive Medical named Alan Kay had an idea for a ‘Personal Computer’ in 1967 like the HP 9100A, only it would be lighter-weight and have a big display. He built his “Flex Machine” for his thesis at the University of Utah in spring 1968 using the HP 1300A for the display. Kay would later pioneer the Dynabook at XeroxPARC, among other great things.
Triple-I had shown early interest in Hollywood, and they used it to model the first prototype of TRON. NASA became interested because of the high-speed circuitry, and asked for a 20x speed-up factor for television signals so they could process space video.
Alan Kay’s '“FlexWriter”
Spring of 1968 on HP 1300A in Dave Evan's U of Utah lab. 5 months before Sutherland @ U of Utah; 7 months before E & S founded "the start of computer graphics"
July 20, 1968
Neil Armstrong’s foot lands on the moon and 600 million citizens in the world ‘see it’ on ‘live TV’ (delayed by the signal transit time and image processing time). Until four months before the landing, only a radio broadcast was anticipated. A custom 80MHz Z-axis signal from a modified HP 1300A made space video practical.
Information International, Inc
(better known as Triple-I or I-I-I) Triple-I was one of the four companies hired to create the CGI animation for the movie TRON. Triple-I created animation for some of the most complex objects in the movie. This scene is Sark’s Carrier.
From these beginnings with Computer Graphic Displays, a lot has happened, including now the multi-display environments enabled by AstroVirtual Inc. More on that later . . . .