Ken Knowlton, BEFLIX, and Bell Labs Engineers & Enthusiasts

Episode Notes
Ken Knowlton passed away at the age of 91 last week. He was one of the leading figures in the establishment of computer graphics and animation

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EandE-Knowlton
Wed, 8/3 2:04PM • 12:43
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
bell labs, work, schwartz, computer graphics, computer, images, figure, ken norton, nude, newton, film, important, fields, lillian, matthews, technologist, picture, billy, smaller version, talking
SPEAKERS
Christopher Garcia
 
Christopher Garcia 
There are a lot of people who could rightfully be called the founder of computer animation, you could make up a list of 10 people by the most knowledgeable people in the field. And there wouldn't be much overlap. But one name that would be guaranteed to be on every list is Ken Knolton, Ken Knolton passed away at the age of 91 this weekend, but he left behind a legacy that has led us to where we are today. This episode, we're talking about Kendall, Bell Labs, and BT. Vis is engineers and enthusiast. Ken Knolton likely is the figure that will receive the most attention when going back over the early days of computer graphics. And for good reason. His work at Bell Labs in particular, was massively important. And while we could go into everything from his work, doing natural language translation in sentences using voyeuristic forms, which, honestly is way beyond my mind, too, is more widely known work. In computer graphics, we're going to focus just on to this episode. And in the next, it's going to be all about eat experiments in art and technology. It'll make sense when you get there. Bell Labs, which you've talked about extensively, was the home of many geniuses. And I'll just focus on four of them. Claude Shannon, and John Pierce, Max Matthews, and Ken Norton. And in the 1960s, these were four of the biggest names in technology in much the same way. 10 years later, the names Don Knuth, John McCarthy, and Feigenbaum and Marvin Minsky represented the peak of their work, despite the fact they were across two different universities. But these four were all at Bell Labs, and that made Bell Labs, a locus, Shannon and Pierce's work cutting across disciplines, two of the most amazing scientists of the 20th century, a figure known to few nowadays, but was incredibly important, Richard Hamming. And he did something very interesting, he told Newton, who was working in all sorts of different sections. He told Knolton slow down, if everyone here made more than one contribution to the Bell System in his lifetime, the system would be in chaos. That is huge. He was looking at the possibility of parsing computer languages, for example, and using them to create images. And in the early 1960s, he developed BEFLIX, which is a sort of a shortening of belflex. And it was the first computer language designed specifically for bitmap moviemaking. Now there had already been some work in computer animation in particular, using things like vector images. That was what Ed's a Jack had done with his demonstration of it looks like a domino that keeps one face pointing towards the globe at all times really innovative.
 
Christopher Garcia 
Mike Knoll was also there and doing some very interesting mathematical works using printers more often than images on a screen. And what they had was a microfilm printer. And so it could put images that would go normally on the screen on to 35 millimeter movie film. Very important idea. So, after a series, this series of subroutine was created, he came up with this concept that was very simple. It was two different qualities of frame that could be created using what we would today consider to be pixels of, I believe, six different intensities. And this would allow you to make relatively rough images, I think it was 256 was the width of each individual frame at a maximum. But this still allowed for excellent expression. And when you look at one of the most important films in the history of computer graphics, one that should 100% be on