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A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers. An early use of the term "personal computer" in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. (See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below). A "microcomputer" used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable input and output devices. "Personal computer" may be used generically or may denote an IBM PC compatible machine.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
Alias Systems Corporation, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was a software company that produced high-end 3D graphics software. Alias was eventually bought by Autodesk.
Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. As of 2023, Athena is still in production use at MIT. It works as software that makes a machine a thin client, that will download educational applications from the MIT servers on demand.
Autodesk Alias is a family of computer-aided industrial design (CAID) software predominantly used in automotive design and industrial design for generating class A surfaces using Bézier surface and non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) modeling method.
The Computer Graphics Lab is a computer lab located at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), founded by the late Dr. Alexander Schure. It was originally located at the "pink building" on the NYIT campus. It has played an important role in the history of computer graphics and animation, as founders of Pixar and Lucasfilm, including Turing Award winners Edwin Catmull and Patrick Hanrahan, began their research there. It is the birthplace of entirely 3D CGI films.
VirtualMagic Animation, Inc. was an American traditional animation studio and software development company based out of Los Angeles, California. The studio produced animation for television series and commercials, and provided ink and paint services to animated TV series such as The Ren and Stimpy Show and The Simpsons and films such as We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. Its software division was best known for developing USAnimation, a high-end software package designed to facilitate the traditional animation process using digital technologies.
Wavefront Technologies was a computer graphics company that developed and sold animation software used in Hollywood motion pictures and other industries. It was founded in 1984, in Santa Barbara, California, by Bill Kovacs, Larry Barels, Mark Sylvester. They started the company to produce computer graphics for movies and television commercials, and to market their own software, as there were no off-the-shelf computer animation tools available at the time. In 1995, Wavefront Technologies was acquired by Silicon Graphics, and merged with Alias Research to form Alias|Wavefront.
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Charles Csuri, better known as Chuck Csuri, was an American artist and computer art creator, described by the Smithsonian magazine as the "father of digital art and computer animation."
John Andrew Berton Jr. is an American computer graphics animator and visual effects supervisor. His most recent completed project is Bedtime Stories. He also worked in India, supervising effects on the film Krrish 3. In the fall of 2013, he joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.
MEDUSA, is a CAD program used in the areas of mechanical and plant engineering by manufacturers and Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) companies. The system's history is closely tied to the beginnings of mainstream CAD and the research culture fostered by Cambridge University and the UK government as well as the resulting transformation of Cambridge into a world-class tech centre in the 1980s.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
In 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling is the process of developing a mathematical coordinate-based representation of a surface of an object in three dimensions via specialized software by manipulating edges, vertices, and polygons in a simulated 3D space.
Siemens Digital Industries Software is an American computer software company specializing in 3D & 2D Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. The company is a business unit of Siemens, operates under the legal name of Siemens Industry Software Inc, and is headquartered in Plano, Texas.
Stephen Michael Martino is an American designer and film director. He is best known for directing the Blue Sky Studios films Horton Hears a Who! (2008), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), and The Peanuts Movie (2015).
Twixt was a 3D computer animation system originally created in 1984 by Julian Gomez at Sun Microsystems. It featured keyframes and tweening in a track-based graphical interface, and was capable of real-time wireframe playback. An Apple Macintosh port, called MacTwixt, was the first known 3D animation software to be released for the Macintosh. It was used by Apple's Advanced Technology Group to create the 1988 short film Pencil Test. Twixt was maintained until 1987 by Cranston/Csuri Productions, and used in their animated television and advertising projects.
References
- ↑ Hayward, Philip (1990). Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: J. Libbey. p. 45. ISBN 0861962664. OCLC 29033757.
- ↑ Carlson, Wayne. "A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation". OSU Dept. of Design. Ohio State University. Archived from the original on 2015-07-31. Retrieved 2015-07-24.
- ↑ Sito, Tom (2013). Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-0262314312. OCLC 936201609.
