In sorting through my mother’s estate after her recent demise I came across a birthday card that I had made for her when I was first using the computer at The Slade. It would probably have been 1978.

The first project that I did using the computer was based upon the sculptures that I had been making on my undergraduate course at Bristol Polytechnic. I had been arranging ‘modules’ in a regular grid pattern on the ground. Using the computer I was able to arrange them in 3D space without worrying about gravity. Note that the graphics library we used at the time did not have a hidden line removal option, hence the ‘wireframe’ rendering. I began to enjoy the ambiguity caused by the perspective projection of 3D shapes onto the 2D plane of the drawing. Fascinated by the way we see stars as if on a hemispherical surface, I had explored the phenomenon at Bristol with a model of the nearest twenty stars to our sun. I later transferred that data to computer drawings too.

There’s more about my early computer graphics here: https://stephenbell.org.uk/ranstak/index.html