Starting to use computers for animation in the 1960s

The first interactive computer graphics project was carried out using the Whirlwind computer that was used in an attempt to create a flight simulator for the military. Other early adopters were GM and Boeing who tried to use the computer to help them design automobiles and airplanes.

The history of interactive graphics began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 with two big projects, one of which was called Sketchpad. It's shown in the next image that was provided by MIT. Sketchpad was created by Ivan Sutherland, and it was the forerunner of programs such as Blender. You can see Timothy Johnson using it to model what looks like a chair. To use it, he's using a light pen, the box with 40 buttons on it, and all the switches on the panel to his left.

The other project was a game called Spacewar!, by Steve Russell, which was the first video game to be distributed.

Let's continue our tour. We're going to look at a demonstration of Sketchpad. Then we will look at Triple I, a company founded by three MIT professors to build advanced computer graphics display hardware and we will see what their in-house 3D animation department was learning. Finally, we will look at the first short from Pixar, where the animation and the computer animation industries met.

Beginnings of 3D animation in 1963

It's time to meet Blender's great-great-grandfather. Originally, TV screens were used by computers for short-term data storage, but it wasn't long before people tried to connect the screens to computers especially for making graphics. We're going to look at videos of a few early efforts. The amazing thing about the first one is that one man came up with all of this in 1961. Ivan Sutherland put this system called Sketchpad together. It's the first real-time interactive computer graphics system; all others are descended from it, including Blender.