Charles Csuri Founds the Computer Graphics Research Group

What this timeline (and history generally) teaches again and again is that nothing is the beginning. Everything has a predecessor and context. But some events participate in "beginning-ness" more than others we can say. And in many ways Charles Csuri's Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) kicked off the field of computer graphics and animation as disciplines.

Even other "beginnings" like Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin in Chicago's EVL point back to this beginning. But of course this isn't quite the actual beginning.

In 1969 Charles Csuri received a National Science Foundation grant to study the computer’s role in research and education in the visual arts. Not such an easy award for an artist to receive smack in the middle of the Space Race, Cold War and Vietnam War. But Csuri got it.

In 1971 he proposed the CGRG at Ohio State, joining faculty and graduate students from art, industrial design, photography and cinema, computer science and mathematics. Starting on an IBM 1130 programmed in FORTRAN, the group worked on hidden-line and shading algorithms and on real-time animation languages. The program seeded two of the prominent real-time computer graphics languages of the next decade, including DeFanti’s GRASS and Manfred Knemeyer’s ANIMA.

An internal NSF report would go on to attribute the greatest impact on computer animation in part to CGRG.