For communication between computers and people, words and numbers may be sufficient, yet for many applications a graphical or pictorial representation may be much more informative. To provide this type of output, Bell Labs installed a Stromberg Carlson 4020 microfilm printer at Murray Hill in 1961. This device, when fed digital information in suitable format from a computer output tape, converted the information into graph or chart form and recorded it photographically on microfilm.

		By using standard, rapid developing and printing equipment, the information was ordinarily delivered to the user as an 8 by 11 inch graph, chart, or picture. Various researchers developed new graphical output software to make these facilities readily available to users. Figture left - The Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder: magnetic tape drive (1), electronics (2), high-precision cathode ray tube (3), forms slide (4), movie camera (5), and hardcopy paper camera (6). From Stromberg-Carlson, a division of General Dynamics). This software included Clement F. Pease’s microfilm package of basic utility subroutines and James F. Kaiser’s TPLOT graph drawing subroutine:
Microfilm recorder.

J. F. Kaiser, "Graphs Should be Computer Drawn," in The Human Use of Computing Machines, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., June 1966, pp. 914

In the first large scale application of these facilities, Walter L. Brown and John D. Gabbe generated several thousand plots from hundreds of thousands of measurements of the earth’s radiation belts made by the TELSTAR satellites:

W. L. Brown and J. D. Gabbe, "The Electron Distribution in the Earth’s Radiation Belts During July 1962 as Measured by Telstar, J. of Geophysical Research 68 (February 1963), pp. 607618.

The cheapness of film production on the Stromberg Carlson recorder suggested the use of movies. Accordingly, Robert M. McClure made a classified movie of a cloud of incoming enemy missiles and decoys, and Joseph B. Kruskal made a movie to display the iterations of his algorithm for multidimensional scaling. Then Edward E. Zajac conveyed the results of his computer simulation of satellite motion as a movie of a gyrating and tumbling box:

E. E. Zajac, "ComputerMade Perspective Movies as a Scientific and Communication Tool," Communications of the ACM 7 (March 1964), pp. 169170.

A. Michael Noll made a stereographic threedimensional movie, and Frank W. Sinden illustrated the educational potential of computer movies in his article "Synthetic Cinematography."

F. W. Sinden, "Synthetic Cinematography," Perspective 7, 1965, pp. 279289.

At about the same time, Knowlton introduced a special movie making language called BEFLIX (see Fig. 12), with which several award winning scientific and artistic films have since been produced:

K. C. Knowlton, "Computer Produced Movies," Science 150 (November 1965), pp. 11161120.