People Behind the Pixels

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Sandy Ressler

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  • hardware
  • animation
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  • Sandy Ressler was one of the students at the Rutgers Computer Art Center, (circa 1974-80). Cocreated the Interart APL graphics system. Had a film "Da Movies" (made in 1978) accepted in 1980 to the Festival International de Jeune Cinema in Hyeres France, that depicted a virtual movie theater with unsavory actions taking place on the screen. This 16mm film was shot frame by frame overnight in the basement of Rutgers computer center. Worked at Bell Labs 1980-1982 creating innovative animations on a novel computer graphics hardware experiment that did real time hidden surface display before Silicon Graphics. His work appeared in Newsweek and the Today Show due to the break up of AT&T Bell Labs at the time and the …

  • Back around 1981 when I was at Bell Labs and worked for Hal Alles, (semi-famous for inventing an amazing music synthesizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Digital_Synthesizer). During the summer there was a summer student who came and aside from playing a lot of tennis with Hal did a lot of work on computer graphics hardware on a VLSI chip. At the time I was programming something called the “Computer Animation Processor” which was a real time hidden surface computer graphics machine that Bell Labs …

  • Bells Labs and SGI Intersection

    Back around 1981 when I was at Bell Labs and worked for Hal Alles, (semi-famous for inventing an amazing music synthesizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Digital_Synthesizer). During the summer there was a summer student who came and aside from playing a lot of tennis with Hal did a lot of work on computer graphics hardware on a VLSI chip. At the time I was programming something called the “Computer Animation Processor” which was a real time hidden surface computer graphics machine that Bell Labs thought might be usable for multi-person games. The idea, remember this was Bell Labs of AT&T, was to encourage the use of phone communication and for people to pley games with each other. I produced a whole bunch of animation demos (great job actually) (see the video Bell Labs Animation Processor https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=98EyJG-xmu4). The computer graphics on this thing were sped up by the use of a lot of specialized hardware which included some chips that did matrix multiplication in real time.  It turns out that that summer student was Marc Hannah who a couple of years later founded Silicon Graphics with his PhD advisor Jim Clark.  Given this connection I was fortunate enough to actually see the original Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation which was shown in a hotel suite at the 1983 (i think) SIGGRAPH. Amusingly I walked in on the SGI running a real time version of Rubik’s cube on the display, which was very similar the Rubik’s cube I had created on the Bell Labs Animation Processor. Rubik’s Cube was still a fad back then. It was breathtaking to see a commercial machine that had that level of graphics power.