Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ was a leading research contributor in computer graphics, computer animation and electronic music from its beginnings in the early 1960s. Initially, researchers were interested in what the computer could be made to do, but the results of the visual work produced by the computer during this period have established people like Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton as pioneering computer artists.

		Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs in 1963, which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the earth as it orbited. This film was titled A two gyro gravity gradient altitude control system. Ken Knowlton developed the Beflix (Bell Flicks) animation system in 1963, which was used to produce dozens of artistic films by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Noll, Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz. Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon experimented with human pattern perception and art by perfecting a technique that scanned, fragmented and reconstructed a picture using patterns of dots (such as symbols or printer characters.) Ruth Weiss created in 1964 (published in 1966) some of the first algorithms for converting equations of surfaces to orthographic views on an output device.
Bell Laboratories logo around 1960s.

The artistic/scientific/educational image making efforts at Bell Labs were some of the first to show that electronic digital processing (using the IBM 7094 computer) could be coupled with electronic film recording (using the Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder) could be used to make exciting, high resolution images. With the dozen or so films made between 1962 and 1967, and the many more films after that, they showed that computer animation was a viable activity. Zajac's work, Sinden's films (eg, Force, Mass and Motion) and studies by Noll in the area of stereo pairs (eg, Simulated basilar membrane motion) were some of the earliest contributions to what is now known as scientific visualization.
		Another angle of orbit.

In 1978 Turner Whitted arrived at Bell Labs from NC State (PhD - 78), and proceeded to shake the CGI world with an algorithm that could ray-trace a scene in a reasonable amount of time. His film, The Compleat Angler is one of the most mimicked pieces of CGI work ever, as every student that enters the discipline tries to generate a bouncing ray-traced ball sequence. Whitted was also very instrumental in the development of various scan line algorithms, as well as approaches to organizing geometric data for fast rendering.

Artists at Bell Labs:

Many revolutionary artistic films and artworks were created at Bell Labs from approximately 1962 to 1967 by artists and programmers such as:

Ed Zajac, Ken Knowlton, Stan VanderBeek, Lillian Schwartz, Michael Noll, Frank Sinden, Turner Whitted, Bella Julesz, C. Bosche, Leon Harmon, Ruth Weiss, Max Mathews, Emmanuel Ghent, Laurie Spiegel, Jerry Spivack, Doris Seligmann and Carl Machover.

It wasn't long before major corporations started taking an interest in computer graphics. TRW, Lockheed-Georgia, General Electric and Sperry Rand are among the many companies that were getting started in computer graphics by the mid 1960's.