History of Computers - Superpaint

Created By: Kurt Louie

Superpaint was a pioneering pixel based frame-buffer graphics system developed by Richard Shoup. It was developed at the Palo Alto Xerox Research Center from 1972 to 1973.

Overview

History

Superpaint was first conceived in late 1972, eventually creating its first image in April of 1973

At first, the hardware wasn't working perfectly, so all the brushes were one pixel thick. Eventually, the program became able to perform functions such as Paint, Move, Copy, Store, Load, Video In, Text, Lines, Gridding, Fill, Shrink 2x, Expand 2x and changing the shape of the brush.

Use of Superpaint

Early on, artist Fritz Fisher took a job as a nightguard at the same building as the system in order to be closer to Superpaint, and he often made images such as this one: Black Girl

As they explored different different types of brushes and painting techniques, artist Bob Flegal made this image: Janet

The first animation done using Superpaint was this one, developed by Bill Bowman: SLOT animation

In the late 70's, Superpaint was used to animate the PBS series "Over Easy" with images such as this one

At the end of 1978, Superpaint helped NASA map the flow of particles from the sun go around Venus in the Pioneer Venus

Hardware

The programmers didn't use the brand-new Intel 1103 1k dynamic Rams because the ones that were used previously were denser and cost less. Because of the way they programmed it, the shift register buffer was actually faster than the other machines with RAM. Early on, this is what the backpanel looked like:=

At the top of the next image is an 8-bit video organizer, which cost about 12,000$, then the fans, then the Superpaint frame frame buffer.

Significance

SuperPaint is significant because it was a pioneering example of a type of system that is commonly used today. While not nearly as advanced as the current ones, for its time Superpaint was a combination of complex hardware and innovative software.