“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels. Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”
– Information technology pioneer and philosopher
Ted Nelson, cited in
Ken Knowlton’s obituary. Knowlton, who died on June 16, was an American engineer, computer scientist, and artist whose work at
Bell Labs in the 1960s paved the way for computer animation. To create his self-referential 1964 short
A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies, for example, Knowlton paired a dedicated programming language with an automatic micro-film recorder.
