Have any of you come across an early machine at MIT called 'Ollie's Folly"? Family lore says that it was something my father, Oliver H. Straus, worked on in, probably, the early '50s. Straus was on the team that developed the Cesium Clock but what he really loved were computers. There were two Olivers on campus at the time, Oliver Straus and Oliver Selfridge. I didn't know my father very well and went on a pilgrimage to find out about him in the early '90s. When I met with Selfridge he didn't have much information except that my father was known as Ollie and Selfridge insisted on being called Oliver. I'm very curious whether there is anything more to find out about him.

Thanks,

Liza

On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 4:46 PM Guy Fedorkow <guy.fedorkow@gmail.com> wrote:

hi Jacob,
did you look into graphics displays on the Whirlwind computer built at MIT in the early 1950's? We have good evidence that there were limited interactive graphics running there before 1952, but I don't know how that fits into work by other researchers
Thanks
/guy

On 2/22/2021 8:08 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:
This is exciting, thank you for sharing Dag! If I can I'd like to also flag my own forthcoming book on the early history of computer graphics from 1950-1980, with a focus on the University of Utah program. It will be released in August 2021 from MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-objects

--

Jacob Gaboury
Assistant Professor of New Media History and Theory
Dept. of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley

jacobgaboury.com/

On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 4:04 PM Dag Spicer <dspicer@computerhistory.org> wrote:

Hello friends,

Just a note about computer graphics: CG pioneer and Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith has completed an amazingly comprehensive book on the origins and development of computer graphics. It is in press right now with MIT Press and is named, “A Biography of the the Pixel.” It will be available in Sept 2021. I have a pre-press version and it’s superb, its coverage of humankind’s expressiveness in art ranging from the cave paintings of Altamira to Toy Story.

Read more at MIT Press here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/biography-pixel

To Infinity and Beyond!

Dag

——
Dag Spicer

Senior Curator

Computer History Museum

1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.

Mountain View, CA 94043

dspicer@computerhistory.org

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