1968 magazine reveals UNIVAC 1107 auto-painting oils from FORTRAN tapes
Merzmensch · x · 2026-11-12
Merzmensch digs up a September 1968 Computers and Automation piece on computer-assisted oil paintings: a Notre Dame team under Dr. Don Mittleman wrote FORTRAN IV software recorded on magnetic tapes, executed by a UNIVAC 1107, which drove a Cal-Comp plotter to produce the artwork "completely automatically."
Each painting took 9 minutes of computer time and 40 minutes of plotter time. The August issue that year also ran the 6th Annual Computer Art Contest, with Japanese artists from Tokyo's Computer Technique Group among participants — a prehistory of generative AI art.
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