
Space Filling Curves (1972) [video] - ffk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e8QJBkCwvo
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rileyjshaw
Fantastic!! High-quality educational videos like this are hard to come by.
Here's another retro tutorial that really stands out in my memory
(differential gears):
[http://youtu.be/K4JhruinbWc?t=1m40s](http://youtu.be/K4JhruinbWc?t=1m40s)

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b6
I love this kind of quiet, careful, deliberate explanation. To me it seems as
if this style is being extinguished by fast cuts and other video tricks that
our eyes find hard to resist. :(

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marknadal
How on earth did they do these animations? I have hardly seen any thing like
them even in 2014!

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keenerd
From the credits:

IBM 360/67 Computer

Stromberg Datagraphix 4060 Graphic Recorder

And then from [http://datagraphix.us/DX-
history.html](http://datagraphix.us/DX-history.html)

"The heart of the Charactron shaped beam tube is the character matrix. A
highly advanced photoengraving process etches minute openings in the shape of
alphanumeric characters (letters and numbers) and other symbols in a thin
metal disc. These characters are transferred to the screen area of the CRT and
then photographed on film (as part of the computer output microfilm process)
or displayed on a terminal (as in our 132-column display products). This
Charactron shaped beam tube forms the heart of most of Datagraphix' products."

So the COM recorders rendered each frame to a CRT and then a film frame is
shot. It sounds like the CRT was a storage-type (with a persistent phosphor).
Now this describes character graphics while all of the animations were vector.
But the 4060 is a "graphic recorder" which sounds like it could do vector
drawings. The colors probably came from a filter put over the lens. You could
do different shades by either changing the beam power or the drawing speed.

I'm more stumped with how they produced the multi-color animations at 13 & 22
minutes. I'm guessing they had to stack multiple shots onto the same film with
different color filters over the film camera lens.

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ganzuul
Hilbert space too, please!

