How Computer-Generated Animations Were Made, Circa 1964 - AT&T Archives 

Apparently they defocused the Charactron image en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BEFLIX&oldid=797023373 ; and by choosing different characters they could achieve different greyscale levels.

@@leocomerford Ah, I see, a bit of a Charactron "hack" then, interesting. Thanks for the info.

Bell basically invented bitmapped graphics. Prior to this, it was all vector or point-plotting. This was all memory-driven.

That's not anti-aliasing, as the original graphics don't have aliasing.

It's actually more like the smoothening algorithms used in some Super Nintendo emulators.

I think it was a control issue with the exposure-time that precluded the use of regular SFA cameras. They required the entire frame to be available in a single go, which, if the picture-tube-animation is anything to go by, was not the case with this system.

+AncientChess No, my dad made this!

+DarthChrisB No really, my dad is Ken Knowlton, early computer graphics pioneer. I'm Rick, his son, chess variants guy. Who's your dad really?

Interesting... some time ago I'd refer to some of your videos occasionally to brush up on the rules of games like makruk and sittuyin... I was just checking out videos about John Whitney's analogue computer work prior and ended up here.

Great! So now you know the whole family story. Find what dad's been doing lately at knowltonmosaics.com :)

Was he deaf or mute ?

Misaka Mikoto you can't even put the right minute you fucking idiot

Zephir il ventilatore chiassoso shut the fuck up anti-Semite

Misaka Mikoto what

You're a fucking antisemite you piece of shit. You berated me because I'm Jewish.

Misaka Mikoto uhm ok now get your head checked

This predates the Amiga by about 20 years or so. The company itself, Commodore International, didn't enter the computer market until 1977, when it introduced its "PET" computer (I had one), and a chess computer a year later called "Chessmate." The PET & PET 2001 computers paved the company's way to introduce the VIC-20 in 1981 and the Commodore 64 (had one of those, too!) in 1982. The Amiga didn't come along until 1985, which I think was about the same time the Commodore 128 came out (I didn't have either of the latter two, but I had a friend who had both the Amiga AND the 128). The main feature of the 128 was its higher memory capacity and an optional 5-¼", 360-kB floppy disk drive (128 kB were a LOT of memory in 1985!), but in actuality, the 64 had more computing power, even though the 128 contained *2* CPU's -- the MOS Technologies MOS-6510, and a Zilog Z-80 running at 2 MHz (half speed). The user could switch back and forth between processors. The Amiga ran on a Motorola 68000 CPU and out-performed both the 64 and 128 (and even the IBM PC with its Intel 8088 CPU!). The PET was a good, entry-level computer; it was good for learning to program simple games in BASIC. In my personal opinion, the Commodore 64 was one of the best home computers of its day, short of the IBM PC and the Radio Shack TRS-80 (also had one of those).

To be fair, I wasn’t exactly knocking it down for that. In fact, it’s downright impressive that it was animation on par with a computer released over 20 years later.