The History of CGI

While I was double-checking facts for the Seventies advertising post a couple days ago, I discovered this useful resource—A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation created by professor Wayne Carlson. The site is more overview than in-depth examination, but it does appear to be fairly thorough and is packed with rare video clips and stills of early CG work. While it’s easy to criticize computer animation for everything that it lacks, a site like this is a reminder of how young the technique is and how quickly it has developed. It’s certainly humbling to watch this early CG experiment (streaming RealPlayer file) by Ed Catmull and to think that just a few decades later his studio is producing Ratatouille.