AT&T Archives: Incredible Machine

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This 1968 short shows some of the ways that Bell Laboratories scientists used computers in communications research. Contains sequences of computer-generated movies, photographs, music and speech. The entire score and main title and credits of the film were produced on a computer - which seems like nothing today, as every film and video in modern production makes its way through a machine - but at the time this was radically early for computer graphics and music.

Bell Labs was responsible for a few computer graphics and music firsts:

1961: computer performs "Daisy Bell" with music programmed by Max Mathews and speech programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum. This was later the inspiration for the computer "HAL" singing the song in the movie 2001. Daisy Bell was also the nickname of one of Alexander Graham Bell's daughters.
1961: The first computer animated film was produced by Edward Zajak.
1963: The first computer animation language, BEFLIX, was created by Ken Knowlton.
1966: first ASCII art, created by Ken Knowlton.

These scientist/artists worked on IBM 704 and 7094 computers in the 1950s and 1960s. They had drastic limitations in terms of computing power and costs, compared to the computers of today.

For example:

IBM 704
The computer these artists and scientists originally worked on in the late 1950s had 192K of RAM, 6mb of memory on tape, cost $200 an hour to use and filled a whole room.

IBM 7094
The earliest computer-generated films, created using an IBM 7094 computer and Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder, cost approximately $500 per minute of output. The 709-series computers were transistorized, and a typical 7094 sold for $3,134,500 in the 1960s.

This film won the CINE Golden Eagle and is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

An Owen Murphy Production
Artwork and computer graphics by Ken Knowlton
Computer-generated music by Max Mathews

• Category

  Science & Technology

[moshmartyr]

/****** BEGIN SEARCH AND REPLACE ******/

Find: programers

Replace: programmers

git st

git add .

git commit -m "proofreading saves face"

git push origin master

git st

/****** END SEARCH AND REPLACE ******/

[ObiTrev]

Damn it was another time, when computer programers wore suits and ties, and not shorts and T-shirts!

[LerfaMu1]

Ctrl + C

"Run"

[WeasleyMcStoat]

Watching this hungover seems really bleak.

[Matt Falcon]

Amazing where the research came from back then. AT&T, a phone company. Not only has technology changed, but the industry has changed so dramatically right along with it. It would be a stretch of the imagination to understand how this research could possibly have been useful to the way phones are used today, but back then phones were still an amazing concept to be tied with computers and technology - and they had to be, to serve the widespread use of telephones.

[Edwin Thanhouser]

Narration by Orson Welles?

[tidbit040]

thx