Article by George Michael - By color-coding the data in each frame, one could see very quickly lots of new information that was not so obvious from looking at numbers or even monochrome pictures. This was, I would say, in the middle to the latter half of 1957. Be advised, though, that much of the computer graphics in that era was associated with classified weapons work, and would not be available for release to the public.

The problem of producing color was, in general, much more difficult. One can think of the customer as the human eye, a very high precision device. It had to see the computer colors as comparable with every day color. The variables in this study included the CRT phosphors, the color films, lenses and film processors. We considered various things, but it was a suggestion of Dave Dixon in our Technical Photography group that the color processes that were available on film could be exploited best by organizing the information we wanted to plot into separate frames of monochrome film, each frame being destined for a unique, logical color. We called this the Color Separation Method. Thus, you could imagine the information on one frame would be meant to be projected onto the color film through a green filter, and the next frame go through blue, and the next frame it would be red, and so on. And, with the help of an optical-effects printer in the darkroom, it would merge these pictures, one on top of the other, through appropriate color filters, onto some ordinary, standard color film, and produce a color image. We tried that, and although it took a long time, it yielded superb color pictures. The problems of directly producing color pictures and movies took considerably longer to overcome, so in the interim this Color Separation Method was used, albeit sparingly. Nonetheless over the years, thousands of colored movies were produced.

Our very first attempts at this, other than just test runs and so forth, were done with the help of Leith's program. Chuck modified the code so that some of the contents of one frame would be designated as green data, and the next would be in blue, and so forth. Of course, one could merge, for instance, green and blue and produce yellow and things like that. This gave a usable color capability without having to wait for the making of a special color CRT and special films and lenses and so on. It turned out that something over six years went by before one could produce color pictures directly from a computer controlled CRT.

I took the first set of black and white (monochrome) runs that were produced. Since we had no equipment of our own at the Lab to do this sort of thing, I took them down to a place in Hollywood called Film Effects. The person who had invented the optical-effects printer during the Second World War ran it. His name was Linwood Dunne. And he thought we were crazy when I told him what we wanted to do and how to do it, but he said, "It's your money, you can do what you want." So, in this manner, he produced our first Color Separated movies, through green, blue, and red filters sequentially. And, lo and behold, we had real color output! It wasn't the best, most slick color in the world, but it was very usable color output. And with it, you could see, for instance, the hottest spots in a field in red, or, when you chose, to show a shock position in yellow. It came out beautifully.

We brought this film back to the Laboratory and showed it to all the designers, and while it was generally very well received, the impression, again was like the reaction to the Benson-Lehrner plotter several years earlier: Ho Hum. It was too involved to become a part of the regular production cycling that had to be done with these design codes.

Dave Dixon built an optical-effects printer that would do the job at the Lab. With that little thing, many, many, movies in color were made, and when the work outgrew the homemade version, we acquired a commercial version where even more elaborate effects were possible. We tried putting the effects printer under control of a computer, but it was a step too far into the future; digital control was still too foreign to the film industry. And, as usual, by the time they caught up, the entire approach had been passed by.

The color films that Kodak and others now started producing for direct exposure by CRTs got to be better and better, along with the processing that was being done, and by our learning about better lenses, and better films, and better CRTs and so forth, we could blend all of these things together and produce the best color film exposures that were possible.