Computer Graphics Museum YouTube Channel

Posted on August 1, 2021 by legalize

I’m pleased to announce that the museum now has an associated YouTube channel!

One of the most difficult tasks of any museum is deciding how to best present information to the public at large and YouTube is a great medium for this. On our channel you will find a video tour of our collection when YouTuber CuriousMarc came to visit our warehouse. CuriousMarc has many vintage computing equipment restoration videos on his channel, including a series of videos on restoring the NASA Apollo Guidance Computer to a fully working system.

Over the last few years, Richard Thomson has given a number of lectures on graphics history to the University of Utah Graphics Seminar. We plan on capturing these talks for YouTube in the future. At the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 2019, Richard Thomson presented one of these lectures on the AT&T Pixel Machine, an interesting piece of hardware with many similarities to modern GPUs in desktop PCs. You can watch other videos from the festival on the VCF Midwest YouTube channel. Richard Thomson will be presenting another one of these lectures at the VCF Midwest 2021 event.

Historic Computer Graphics Instruction

Posted on October 12, 2017 by legalize

The YouTube channel CG Time Machine has uploaded a bunch of videotaped lectures of the class CS292 from UC Berkeley. The lectures are given by such names in computer graphics as Jim Blinn, Alvy Ray Smith, Ed Catmull and Loren Carpenter. Check out these videos for a glimpse into early instruction in computer graphics!

BitSavers Posts CDC ICEM Documentation

Posted on February 16, 2017 by legalize

BitSavers has just posted scans of Control Data Corporation‘s Integrated Computer-Aided
Engineering and Manufacturing (ICEM) Engineering Data Library (EDL) as used on the Control Data Network Operating System (NOS). ICEM was a minor player in the overall CAD market, but ICEM Surface gained a prominent position in car body design. You can browse the documents on BitSavers.

For an overall history of the CAD industry, I recommend David Weisberg’s online free book The Engineering Design Revolution.

BEFLIX

Posted on February 1, 2017 by legalize

Richard Thomson gave a presentation on BEFLIX, the first embedded domain-specific language for creating animated films on a computer, to the University of Utah Graphics Lunch seminar on January 31st, 2017. Below are some animated films created with BEFLIX, courtesy of AT&T Archives on YouTube.

Continue reading →

Xerox Alto Restoration

Posted on December 21, 2016 by legalize

Over on YouTube, CuriousMarc has been chronicling the restoration of a Xerox Alto workstation. Marc has the advantage of living in silicon valley, so he gets to have drop-in visits from the creators of ethernet to help with the networking debugging and assistance from the folks who created the Alto. Check out his Xerox Alto restoration playlist on YouTube for a series of very interesting videos!

Whatever Happened to the Utah Teapot?

Posted on December 5, 2016 by legalize

The Salt Lake Tribune has a nice write-up on Whatever happened to … the ubiquitous digital ‘Utah teapot’?

Utah Vintage Computing Enthusiasts Meetup: Nov. 17th, 2016

Posted on November 15, 2016 by legalize

Post on Vintage Computer Federation forum.

New Hosting Provider

Posted on October 17, 2016 by legalize

The Computer Graphics Museum has changed hosting providers to XMission, Utah’s largest independent internet service provider. Our new provider gives us improved access to our hosting environment allowing us to work on providing better services going forward.

Things have been proceeding behind the scenes, but difficulties with our hosting environment prevented us from sharing those efforts with you. Obviously, we are back to sharing news again!

One of the next big projects for the museum is to create a searchable catalog of artifacts in the museum’s collection. This will be easier to prototype and deploy with the improved access.

Xerox Alto Source Code Released

Posted on October 22, 2014 by legalize

Over at the Computer History Museum, they’ve managed to get the Xerox Alto source code released. The Xerox Alto was a huge step forward in bringing computer graphics into the service of the ordinary user with its desktop metaphor for interacting with computer resources. Getting the source code for the system and making it publicly available is giving you the ability to travel back in time and see state-of-the-art systems from the inside.

Browse the source code.

2014 Evans & Sutherland Employee Reunion June 27th in Salt Lake City

Posted on June 16, 2014 by legalize

Every year the employees of Evans & Sutherland have a reunion picnic in Sugar House Park in Salt Lake City, UT. This year the picnic will be on June 27th, 2014. They usually take a big group photo of those who attend.

2014 Evans & Sutherland Employee Reunion Invitation

If you know of other computer graphics companies that hold employee reunions, please let the museum know and we’ll be happy to post notices for those as well.