Parallel Developments

This chapter presents artists and developers whose ideas ultimately did not influence the software used today as directly and intensively as Sutherland&s;s approach. The focus is directed on Charles Csuri&s;s and William Fetter&s;s computer graphics achievements here. For comparison with Sutherland other US developments are deliberately chosen here in order to illustrate that even within one country and initially a fairly small research community that was devoted to computer graphical endeavors there could and did exist a certain variability in terms of the idea of what computer graphic images could be. Exploring these parallel paths is key, as this comparison clearly establishes for the first time how arbitrary the technological developments of computer graphics were. This variability provides evidence for wide-reaching conclusions of the fact that no technological advancement is universal or all-encompassing.