The October 30, 1967, issue of Aviation Week has two pages with interesting computer history. On one page is an article describing and illustrating progress at General Electric in developing a computer system that “draws” pictures ona TV screen… clearly very early computer animation. The objects shown can only be straight-edged polygons; the system was not capable of reproducing curved surfaces. The objects were limited to 240 edges. But it was capable of producing 20 to 30 images per second, more than adequate for real-time simulation purposes. So there you can see the beginnings of a massively important aspect of computer technology… from this and related work we get the pikes of modern flight simulators, video games and movies like Zootopia.
And on the other side of the page is an ad for a technology that I’ve never even heard of: computer memory systems made of “woven plated wires.” I think this is a variation of the “core rope memory” systems used in the 1960s, and could store a staggering 2,592 bits on a chunk about the size of a floppy disk. Unlike the computer graphics show on the preceding page, this particular technology was a dead end.
