Inventions in Computing by Keranen Rachel;

Inventions in Computing by Keranen Rachel;

Author:Keranen, Rachel; [Keranen, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC


The Colossus did not store programs and, like the ENIAC, was reprogrammed for different jobs by modifying the machine’s wiring. The version here is a reconstruction.

Computers were still very large and expensive, and most computers belonged to universities or corporate research and development teams. One of those teams was Bell Labs, a subsidiary of AT&T and a center of innovation. Scientists at Bell Labs invented the transistor (a semiconductor device used today in computer memory chips), developed the first satellite communication system, and discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. In the 1960s, a computer scientist at Bell Labs built the first programming language for film animation.

A REVOLUTION in FILM ANIMATION

The first computer graphics were invented as ways to monitor what was happening within the computer’s memory operations. Soon, displays were used to track missile trajectories and, by 1963, airplanes. At the same time, early computer games began to appear, such as Spacewar! from a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At Bell Labs, a computer scientist saw another application for the fledgling computer graphics industry. Before computer animation, animated movies were produced in a slow, heavily hands-on process. Kenneth Knowlton saw an opportunity to use computers to change that process forever.

Traditional Animation

In traditional animation, an illustrator draws a series of images with small changes such that, frame by frame, the drawings represent a sequence over time.

For example, to create an animated sequence of a woman chopping wood, the illustrator would create a series of drawings with her arm holding the ax in a number of positions. To create the illusion of an object moving, different characters and objects in a scene are inked and painted on transparent sheets of celluloid (called cels). When the woman is holding the ax, she and the ax could be painted on the same cel. When she puts the ax down, they would be painted on separate cels so she could be made to move independently of the ax.

The cels are stacked on top of each other with the background layer (or layers) at the bottom and photographed. Between shots, someone moves the background and cels to advance the story. A movie camera would capture the sequence of images on film and create the effect of animation. For many traditionally animated movies, twelve drawings per second are shown, except in scenes with quick movements, when the rate increases to twenty-four drawings per second to create a more lifelike effect.

Computer Animation’s Beginnings

Kenneth Knowlton, a computer scientist at Bell Labs, wanted to create a way to produce animated films on computers. He wrote to his department head and suggested that a programming language could transform the process of making animated movies. The department head gave him permission to work on the project.

In 1963, Knowlton developed BEFLIX, which stands for Bell Flicks. The programming language could create and manipulate pictures using pixels (minute areas of a display screen) and bitmaps (a file that indicates the color, pixel by pixel, of regions on a display screen).



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