HISTORY

The precursor sciences to the development of modern computer graphics were the advances in electrical engineering, electronics, and television that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. Screens could display art since the Lumiere brothers' use of mattes to create special effects for the earliest films dating from 1895, but such displays were limited and not interactive. The oscilloscope, the complex avionics control panel, and the naval control panels of the World War II period would prove to be the more direct precursors of the field, as they provided the first two-dimensional electronic displays that responded to user input. Early projects like the Whirlwind and SAGE Projects introduced the CRT as a viable display and interaction interface and introduced the light pen as an input device. A programmer for the Whirlwind SAGE system performed a personal experiment in 1954 in which a small program he wrote captured the movement of his finger and displayed its vector (his traced name) on a display scope. The same individual,Douglas T. Ross, working at MIT on transforming mathematic statements into computer generated machine tool vectors in 1959 took the opportunity to create a display scope image of a Disney cartoon character.One of the first interactive videogames to feature recognizable, interactive graphics was created for an oscilloscope by William Higinbothamto entertain visitors in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory and simulated a tennis match. The phrase “Computer Graphics” itself was coined in 1960 by William Fetter, a graphic designer for Boeing. The field of computer graphics developed with the emergence of computer graphics hardware.




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