--- John Allain <allain_at_panix.com> wrote:
> > All this talk makes me wonder (and I know this question has been
> > answered before, but I have forgotten): what equipment did they
> > use to do the computer graphics in movie Tron?
>
> One company (there were at least three for Tron), MAGI, actually used an
> IBM Mainframe programmed with punch cards (I don't know which framebuffer
> they used). Not too exciting to watch being done. Remember, CG was and
> still is made in non-real-time, only back then it was a little more
> extreme. MAGI Synthavision was a real early bird. I remember seeing an
> article for it in Popular Science in the 70's.
A buddy of mine I still see on a regular basis, hand-wrapped the frame-
buffer for the 11/780 at Cranston-Csuri, here in Columbus, late 1970s-
early 1980s. At one point, they were one of the premiere graphics
companies in the country. I know they did intros to Sunday sports shows
(if you ever saw a football morph into a basketball and sink on a rim-shot,
that was them) and they did some of the opening graphics (of the Huntington
Bank building, downtown) for "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", a cheesy low-
budget Canadian film starring Raul Julia before he was famous.
C-S died because they were charging outrageous fees per second of animation
and when Apollo and other workstations came along, it became cheaper for
their customers to buy the equipment _and_ staff it than it was to keep
paying C-S for their animations. They were the dinosaurs when the mammals
moved in. Neat toys, though.
-ethan
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Received on Fri Aug 03 2001 - 09:43:33 BST