Computer graphics: a concept sale

It was the consensus of the "Computer Graphics in the 70's" discussion at the recent ACM convention that the promise of computer graphics which glowed so promisingly in the mid-sixties had fallen far short of expectations° Not only had the majority of users of computers not become totally dependent on graphic display, the strongest advocates of nonalphanumeric visible output have made only a minor impression on the world of computers° The concept of graphics has not been sold to the computer community° The term "computer graphics" itself is shrouded in mystery to the uninitiated, full of promise to the graphics peripheral vendor, ignored by business data processors, and considered too expensive by everyone° Only in those bastions of computer application; the aerospace and automotive industries, has the use of computer graphics become an indispensable part of normal business operations° Mention "computer graphics" to a printer and he thinks of photocomposition, justification, and variety of fonts and sizes. To the COBOL oriented business, the term connotes printer plots° The plotter user, watching his machine click and buzz its way through an amazingly complex four-color plot dreams of artistic creations with lacy mathematical convolutions° And to the avant-garde it can mean nothing less than animated realtime perspective pictures with hidden line solution and hardware matrix transformation° From printer plots to moving pictures of an unreal world, the notion of what "graphics" is (are?) eludes commonality° It is nearly as ill-defined as the numerator of the commonly used but seldom quantified expression "throughput per unit cost o" Though all of this may seem flip or disrespectful toward a field the author holds in high regard, it is hoped that it will provide some motivation for clarifying the bewildering proliferation of "graphics o"