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Oral history interview with Carl Machover
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Machover, Carl |
| Copyright Year | 2002 |
| Abstract | Carl Machover is computer graphics pioneer and president of Machover Associates Corporation (MAC), a computer graphics consultancy founded in1976. MAC provides a broad range of management, engineering, marketing, and financial services to computer graphics users, suppliers, and investors worldwide. In this oral history Machover describes his upbringing in Iowa and training in the Eddy radar and radio program and other Navy service schools in Mississippi and Texas. He also provides details of his education under the G.I. Bill at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Machover notes his employment at Norden Laboratories Corporation in White Plains, NY, and his publication of the primer Basics of Gyroscopes (1960), intended initially for the Norden sales force. He then describes his move to Skiatron Electronics & Television Corporation where he helped form a subcontractor RMS Associates to build and market CRT character generators. RMS later changed its name to Information Displays, Inc. (IDI) and created the stand-alone computer-aided design (CAD) platform the IDIIOM (IDI Input-Output Machine). IDIIOM had its own operating system based on the Varian 620-I computer, a DEC PDP competitor. Machover also comments on TV scan versus vector scan, the relative merits of color and 3D information displays, potential health problems related to flickering display and jitter, interaction with the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Subjects), and the adoption of CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing) and a SIGGRAPH 'CORE' graphics standard in the 1970s. 3 This is an oral history taken with Carl Machover on Thursday, June 20, 2002, in White Plains, New York, for the Charles Babbage Institute Software History Project. Frana: Carl, tell me a little about your upbringing. Machover: Sure. I was born in Brooklyn. At the age of three my family left New York and came out to the Midwest. My mother had been from the Midwest. She met my father while in New York on a vacation. And so they moved to Davenport, Iowa, together. I stayed there, graduated from Davenport High School, and then entered the Navy during World War II. None of my family really had much of a technical bent at all. I had one cousin who was a chemical engineer, and at one time I wanted to be a chemical engineer. I had no idea why, but most of my relatives came in from the business side. I had one uncle who was a marvelous artist, but most of them founded and operated a big scrap yard in Davenport, Iowa. This was a fairly substantial business. They moved from scrap to doing grain transfer, so they eventually had barges and that type of thing. Frana: Were you artistic? Machover: Back in Iowa I was a ‘non-singer.’ They wouldn’t even let me sing in music class. I got everybody off-key. So it may come as somewhat of a shock that my family is so artistic. My wife is a pianist. My son is a composer trained at MIT. My oldest daughter is also an accomplished pianist. My youngest daughter actually took fine arts at Boston University and then worked in the computer graphics field for about ten years. She’s also |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://works.bepress.com/philip_frana/14/download/ |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Discussion |
