Two Boeing researchers named computer graphics in 1960
Computer graphics is the craft of making and handling images with computers, and it now drives nearly every screen you own. The name dates from 1960, coined at Boeing by Verne Hudson and William Fetter, but its roots run back to cathode ray tubes, radar and a 1958 oscilloscope tennis game.
The field covers a lot of ground. It includes how a machine stores and alters image data, the technologies used to produce pictures, and the methods for synthesising visual content digitally. One broad definition calls it almost anything on a computer that is neither text nor sound. It underpins digital photography, film, games, digital art and phone displays, and in cinema it usually goes by the abbreviation CGI. Output is commonly sorted into two-dimensional, three-dimensional and animated work; 3D has grown more common as hardware improved, yet 2D remains everywhere.
Its ancestors came from the first half of the twentieth century: electrical engineering, electronics and television. The Lumière brothers used mattes for special effects in films from 1895, though such screen tricks could not respond to anyone. The Braun tube, the first cathode ray tube, arrived in 1897 and led to the oscilloscope and military control panels, the first electronic displays that reacted to programs or operators. Even so, the discipline stayed obscure until the post-war 1950s, when university research and American military work on radar, aviation and rockets generated floods of data that demanded new kinds of display.
Early landmarks were playful as well as serious. The Whirlwind and SAGE projects proved the CRT could serve as an interactive screen and introduced the light pen. Douglas T. Ross wrote a small program that tracked his finger and drew his traced name on a scope, and in 1959 at MIT he put a Disney character on a display. In 1958 William Higinbotham built Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope to amuse visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the first interactive games with recognisable graphics.
Today the results appear in television, newspapers, weather reports, medical investigations and surgery, and a well-made chart can make difficult statistics legible. Offshoots such as information visualization and scientific visualization now focus on rendering volumes, surfaces and lighting for architecture, meteorology and biology.
Source: Computer graphics
