As a graduate student at Ohio State in the mid-1970s, I inherited a unique computer
vision laboratory from the doctoral research of previous students. They had
designed and built an early frame-grabber to deliver digitized color video from a
(very large) electronic video camera on a tripod to a mini-computer (sic) with a
(huge!) disk drive—about the size of four washing machines. They had also designed
a binary image array processor and programming language, complete with
a user’s guide, to facilitate designing software for this one-of-a-kind processor. The
overall system enabled programmable real-time image processing at video rate for
many operations.