Word: specializations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...KOPPEL REPORT: D.C. -- DIVIDED CITY (ABC, April 27, 10 p.m. EDT). The much-publicized plague of drug-related violence in the nation's capital is examined by Ted Koppel, first in a prime-time special, then in a live discussion that will take over the Nightline time period...
Anniversaries are television's most annoying bad habit. No TV series, it seems, can pass a milestone ending in zero (Barbara Walters' 50th special, Sesame Street's 20th season) without leading us on a forced march down Memory Lane. Now, saints preserve us, the 50th anniversary of TV itself has arrived -- at least by one measure. On April 20, 1939, RCA formally introduced the modern system of TV broadcasting at the New York World's Fair. One could just as plausibly trace TV's origin back to 1927, when the nation's first experimental TV stations went...
...like them on display last week in Philadelphia at the tenth annual exposition of the National Computer Graphics Association are more than pretty pictures. Each represents a three- dimensional microcosm, stored within the memory of a computer, that human operators can turn, twist and reshape all they want. When special goggles, bodysuits and gloves are used to display and manipulate the images, those microcosms can become so real that viewers feel they have stepped through a kind of electronic looking glass into a completely artificial, computer- generated world...
...artists, engineers and enthusiasts gathered for their big show, the computer-graphics experts had special reason to celebrate. Late last month two of their own, John Lasseter and William Reeves of Pixar, a computer manufacturer in San Rafael, Calif., won the first Academy Award given for a totally computer-generated film -- a short subject called Tin Toy that starred a rambunctious baby and a windup music man. Says Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research, a small Redwood City, Calif., company that makes the equipment used to help people enter a computer-generated world: "This is the year that this stuff...
...past five years much of this mathematical logic has been incorporated into tiny, special-purpose computer chips. Graphics calculations that used to require a $250,000 bank of hardware can now be performed by a single plug-in board. In just the past year the cost of an entry-level 3-D computer has fallen by nearly 70%, to less than $16,000. Within the next five to eight years, predicts Jim Clark, chairman of Silicon Graphics, the leading manufacturer of 3-D workstations, "we'll see the kind of images Tin Toy represents on an ordinary personal computer...