I recently gave a talk at a meeting of the Edinburgh branch of the British Computer Society. The title of the talk was ‘The Origins and Development of Computer Graphics‘. It’s a revised version of a talk I gave a few years ago at another BCS branch meeting, with fewer slides but adding information on graphics pipelines and GPUs.
Here is the synopsis:-
Computer graphics are everywhere, from the smartphone in your pocket to tablets, laptop and desktop computers, video games, public information displays, CGI in films – the list is endless. We think of computer graphics technology as originating with the early video games of the 1980s and 1990s, however, its development goes back to the very beginning of electronic computation. In this presentation I will trace the fascinating history of computer graphics from its source in Project Whirlwind at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 through the developments in timesharing and computer-aided design of the 1960s and ‘70s to the high-quality interactive graphics that give today’s personal computing devices their amazing capabilities.
You can download a copy of the slides from the talk here.
The Story of the Computer 