Thomas DeFanti Develops Animation Language GRASS (Graphics Symbiosis System)

GRASS (Graphics Symbiosis System) is simply put one of the most important advancements in computer graphics, well, ever, but especially of the 1970s. Combined with Dan Sandin's Image Processor and others, it transformed the capabilities of computers. It gave them the ability to animate in real time on a screen, something dreamed of since the days of oscillographs.

Completed as DeFanti’s doctoral work at Ohio State University, this landmark early computer animation language that was used by Larry Cuba to produce the graphics for the training sequence for the Rebel attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. Cuba would work on GRASS with DeFanti at the University of Illinois Chicago beginning in 1975. Copper Giloth worked on GRASS doing simulations of water sculptures for a friend experimentally.

DeFanti wrote GRASS in Charles Csuri’s Computer Graphics Research Group, supported by Csuri’s 1971 National Science Foundation grant for real-time film animation. It ran on the group’s PDP-11/45 with a Vector General display.