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SOFTWARE TAKES COMMAND
SuperPaint menu, 1975.
broadcasts just a handful of times. And while in the next decade their use became more common, only in the middle of the 1990s did the synergy Shoup predicted truly became visible. As we will see in the chapter on After Effects below, the result was a dramatic reconfiguration not just of the visual languages of television but of all visual techniques invented by humans up to that point. In other words, what began as a new “videographic medium” in 1973 had eventually changed all visual media. But even if we forget about SuperPaint’s revolutionary ability to combine graphics and video, and discount its new tools such resizing, moving, copying, etc., we are still dealing with a new creative medium (Smith’s term). As Smith pointed out, this medium is the digital frame buffer,46 a special kind of computer memory
Alvy Ray Smith, “Digital Paint Systems: An Anecdotal and Historical Overview,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 2011, http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/ history/PDFs/paint.pdf 46