The Original Chip Set (OCS) is a chipset used in the earliest Commodore Amiga computers and defined the Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities. It was succeeded by the slightly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and the greatly improved Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA).
The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse, Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of the first computers to use a WYSIWYG text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems.
In computer graphics, planar is the method of arranging pixel data into several bitplanes of RAM. Each bit in a bitplane is related to one pixel on the screen. Unlike packed, high color, or true color graphics, the whole dataset for an individual pixel is not in one specific location in RAM, but spread across the bitplanes that make up the display. Planar arrangement determines how pixel data is laid out in memory, not how the data for a pixel is interpreted; pixel data in a planar arrangement could encode either indexed or direct color.
In packed pixel or chunky framebuffer organization, the bits defining each pixel are clustered and stored consecutively. For example, if there are 16 bits per pixel, each pixel is represented in two consecutive (contiguous) 8-bit bytes in the framebuffer. If there are 4 bits per pixel, each framebuffer byte defines two pixels, one in each nibble. The latter example is as opposed to storing a single 4-bit pixel in a byte, leaving 4 bits of the byte unused. If a pixel has more than one channel, the channels are interleaved when using packed pixel organization.
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and icons in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned, handling transparent pixels, and various ways of combining the source and destination data.
Bit blit is a data operation commonly used in computer graphics in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a boolean function.
A framebuffer is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor.
Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a character set; at the same time, contrasted to graphics mode or other kinds of computer graphics modes.
The Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) is the custom computer chip, along with a variant of the MOS Technology 6502 constituting the heart of the 1977 Atari Video Computer System game console. The TIA generates the screen display, sound effects, and reads the controllers. At the time the Atari VCS was designed, even small amounts of RAM were expensive. The chip was designed around not having a frame buffer, instead requiring detailed programming to create even a simple display.
The Motorola 6845, or MC6845, is a display controller that was widely used in 8-bit computers during the 1980s. Originally intended for designs based on the Motorola 6800 CPU and given a related part number, it was more widely used alongside various other processors, and was most commonly found in machines based on the Zilog Z80 and MOS 6502.
The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) was a proprietary collection of software, scanning camera systems, servers, networked computer workstations, and custom desks developed by The Walt Disney Company and Pixar in the late 1980s. Although outmoded by the mid-2000s, it succeeded in reducing labor costs for ink and paint and post-production processes of traditionally animated feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). It also provided an entirely new palette of digital tools to the animation filmmakers.
Alvy Ray Smith III is an American computer scientist who co-founded Lucasfilm's Computer Division and Pixar, participating in the 1980s and 1990s expansion of computer animation into feature film.
Dual-ported video RAM (VRAM) is a dual-ported variant of dynamic RAM (DRAM), which was once commonly used to store the framebuffer in graphics adapters.
In computing, indexed color is a technique to manage digital images' colors in a limited fashion, in order to save computer memory and file storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It is a form of vector quantization compression.
The Cromemco Dazzler was a graphics card for S-100 bus computers introduced in a Popular Electronics cover story in 1976. It was the first color graphics card available for microcomputers. The Dazzler was the first of a succession of increasingly capable graphics products from Cromemco which, by 1984, were in use at 80% of all television stations in the U.S. for the display of weather, news, and sports graphics.
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.
Richard Shoup was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, mainly known from his pioneering work on computer graphics and animation. Originally from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, he last resided in San Jose, California.
David DiFrancesco,, is a photoscientist, inventor, cinematographer, and photographer. He is a founding member of three organizations which pioneered computer graphics for digital special effects and film with Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, including; New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm Computer Division, and Pixar, financed by Steve Jobs.
The Pixar Photoscience Division, a division of Pixar Animation Studios, was founded in 1979 at Lucasfilm for the express purpose of designing and building a laser recorder/scanner system to input and output film to a computer for compositing and color correction of special effects. In the early years of Pixar's history, the team was responsible for the design of color monitoring instrumentation to control the color gamut and gamma of the digital images onto 35mm film using a more advance laser recorder system called PixarVision. In later years at Pixar, the team was responsible for transforming the artists computer-animated images onto film master negatives. Today the team manages all digital content to a variety of delivery media, film, DVD, and digital cinema projection. The team has won Engineering and Technical Academy Awards and patents for their work in Motion Picture Sciences.
