Computer Graphics Circa 1975

I scanned some photographs of some of my earliest computer graphics experiments, they are very primitive but I still like them a lot.





This image was produced sometime around 1975, using my hand-built SOL-20 computer with a Graphic-Add display board, giving an amazingly high resolution of 128×64 (or something like that). I wrote programs in BASIC to draw bezier curves, and output via assembly-language graphics routines. It was a lot of work for such low rez output. I photographed the image on the 9″ monitor with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, you can see the curvature of the screen if you look closely. Somewhere in storage I have some better quality photos of this image, with some 3D sculptures made from this pattern. I traced the curves on tracing paper, cut layers of wood, then glued them together like a topographic map. My display of photos and sculptures was the first exhibit of computer graphics at my university’s art school.