Oral history interview with Carl Machover

Abstract

Carl Machover is computer graphics pioneer and president of Machover Associates Corporation (MAC), a computer graphics consultancy founded in 1976. 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.