A flexible, high performance interactive graphics system

A computer graphics system with refresh and storage displays, flat-bed plotter, digitizer and film recorder is described. The software structure comprises a device-independent, front-end graphics package and a driver program for each device. Two and three-dimensional vectors, hardware and software characters, transformations and windowing, picture segmentation, element and segment attributes, and input from interactive tools, such as a light-pen, are supported. The extent to which the system is used by different research groups shows that this is a very cost-effective way to provide computer graphics facilities.