13. Reading, Text 2 a Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation

Ivan Sutherland, acknowledged by many to be the "grandfather" of interactive computer graphics and graphical user interfaces, worked on his PhD in EE in the Lincoln Labs on their TX-2 computer. Sutherland learned to program in high school using a small relay computer called SIMON. SIMON was a relay-based computer with six words of two bit memory. Its 12 bits of memory permitted SIMON to add up to 15. Sutherland's first big computer program was to make SIMON divide. To make division possible, he added a conditional stop to SIMON's instruction set. This program was a great accomplishment, it was the longest program ever written for SIMON, a total of eight pages of paper tape.

This was the beginning of a distinguished career in computers, graphics, and integrated circuit design. He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) on a full scholarship. He received an M.S. from Cal Tech, and then enrolled at MIT to work on his Ph.D. His dissertation centered around an interactive computer drawing program that he called Sketchpad, which was published in 1963. His contributions moved graphics from a military laboratory tool to the world of engineering and design. Sutherland made a movie of the interactive use of Sketchpad, which became somewhat of a cult film. It is widely acknowledged that every major lab in the country had a copy of the film, and researchers and students still refer to it over and over, as it influenced their developmental work so significantly.

Sutherland's software, described in a 1963 paper, "Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System," used the lightpen to create engineering drawings directly on the CRT. Highly precise drawings could be created, manipulated, duplicated, and stored. The software provided a scale of 2000:1, offering large areas of drawing space. Sketchpad pioneered the concepts of graphical computing, including memory structures to store objects, rubber-banding of lines, the ability to zoom in and out on the display, and the ability to make perfect lines, corners, and joints. This was the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) long before the term was coined.

At a time when cathode ray tube monitors were themselves a novelty, Dr. Ivan Sutherland's 1963 software-hardware combination, Sketchpad, enabled users to draw points, line segments and circular arcs on a cathode ray tube with a light pen. In addition Sketchpad users could assign constraints to whatever they drew and specify relationships among the segments and arcs. The diameter of arcs could be specified, lines could be drawn horizontally or vertically, and figures could be built up from combinations of elements and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized and their constraints were preserved. Sketchpad also included the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm which made possible the capability of zooming in on objects while preventing the display of parts of the object whose coordinates fall outside the window.

The development of the Graphical User Interface, which is ubiquitous today, has revolutionized the world of computing, bringing to large numbers of discretionary uses the power and utility of the desk top computer. Several of the ideas first demonstrated in Sketchpad are now part of the computing environments used by millions in scientific research, in business applications, and for recreation. These ideas include:

• the concept of the internal hierarchic structure of a computer-represented picture and the definition of that picture in terms of sub-pictures;

• the concept of a master picture and of picture instances which are transformed versions of the master;

• the concept of the constraint as a method of specifying details of the geometry of the picture;

• the ability to display and manipulate iconic representations of constraints;

• the ability to copy as well as instance both pictures and constraints;

• some elegant techniques for picture construction using a light pen;

• the separation of the coordinate system in which a picture is defined from that on which it is displayed;

• recursive operations such as "move" and "delete" applied to hierarchically defined pictures.

The implications of some of these innovations (e.g., constraints) are still being explored by Computer Science researchers today.

The Media Laboratory was formed in 1980 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner, growing out of the Architecture Machine Group, and building on the seminal work of faculty members such as Marvin Minsky in cognition, Seymour Papert in learning, Barry Vercoe in music, Muriel Cooper in graphic design, Andrew Lippman in video, and Stephen Benton in holography. The media Lab carries on advanced research into a broad range of information technologies including digital television, holographic imaging, computer music, computer vision, electronic publishing, artificial intelligence, human/machine interface design, and education-related technologies. Its charter is to invent and creatively exploit new media for human well-being and individual satisfaction without regard to present-day constraints. They employ supercomputers and extraordinary input/output devices to experiment today with notions that will be commonplace tomorrow. The not-so-hidden agenda is to drive technological inventions and break engineering deadlocks with new perspectives and demanding applications.

Another MIT engineer, Ken Olsen, was working at Lincoln Labs on the TX-2 project. In 1957 Olsen founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He shepherded the transition of the TX-2 technology into a commercial environment, and in 1961 started construction of their DEC's first computer, the PDP-1. The PDP-1 was considered a milestone in the computer era, because it was the world's first commercial interactive computer. It was used by its purchasers to pioneer timesharing systems, making it possible to have access to much more (affordable) computing power than ever before.

In 1961 a young computer programmer from MIT, Steve Russell led a team that created the first computer game. It took the team about 200 man-hours to write the first version of Spacewar. They wrote Spacewar on a PDP-1 which was a donation to MIT from DEC, who hoped MIT's think tank would be able to do something remarkable with their product. The PDP-1's operating system was the first to allow multiple users to share the computer simultaneously. This was perfect for playing Spacewar, which was a two-player game involving warring spaceships firing photon torpedoes. Each player could maneuver a spaceship and score by firing missiles at his opponent while avoiding the gravitational pull of the sun. Russell transferred to Stanford University, where he introduced computer game programming and Spacewar to an engineering student named Nolan Bushnell, who went on to write the first coin-operated computer arcade game and start Atari Computers.

Through the 1960s DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a price/performance point below IBM 's 18-bit word, core memory mainframe machines. In 1964 they introduced the PDP-8. It was a smaller 12-bit word machine that sold for about $16,000. The PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer. It was important historically because their low cost and portability made it the first computer that could be purchased by the end users as an alternative to using a larger system in a data center. Many small computer graphics labs could now have a dedicated computer on which to experiment with new software and hardware.

DEC was also an important contributor to the graphics display and terminal market. Their products were influenced by work in the Electronic Systems Laboratory (ESL) at MIT. In 1968 they introduced the DEC 338 intelligent graphics terminal, which was a refresh display with point, vector and character drawing capability. Other devices in this class were the DEC 340, IBM 2250, and IMLAC PDS-1. In 1974 they marketed the VT-52, which incorporated the first addressable cursor in a graphics display terminal. One of their most functional terminals, the VT-100 was introduced in 1981, and is still in operation in hundreds of computer rooms around the world. A common object in graphics labs was the disk cartridge, such as the DEC RL02. It had approximately 2.2 MB of storage (1.1 on each side) and a 60 ms seek time.

14. Read the text. Answer the following questions:

1. What is computer graphics?

2. Who is a "grandfather" of interactive computer graphics and graphical user interfaces?

3. What is SIMON?

4. Do you know what is PDP-1?

5. Who was also an important contributor to the graphics display and terminal market?

15. Explain the following words and word-combinations in English:

1. resolution

2. wireframe

3. extraordinary

4. constraint

5. recursive

6. holographic imaging

7. elegant techniques

16. Make up sentences of your own with words from ex. 15

17. Make up the plan of the text and summarize information.