Before Sutherland’s 1963
Sketchpad, alphanumeric output via plotters/printers, input via
keypunch, both in batch;
some hacked “graphics” made with characters :>)
•
•
Batch Computing (1950s –
now)
Before Interactive
Computer Graphics
Computer Graphics
The IBM 026 keypunch (left). The IBM 704 (right) took up a
whole room and was capable of about 4,000 arithmetic operations/second.
Cool facts: Whirlwind, built in the early 50’s at MIT, cost $4.5 million
and could perform
40,000 additions/second. Mac 512K, list price $3,195 in 1984,
could do 500,000
operations/second. Today, commodity PCs perform approximately
two or three billion
operations/second
