GRASS (programming language)

GRASS, short for GRAphics Symbiosis System, is a programming language built to script two dimensional vector graphics animations. Its syntax resembles BASIC, but it adds many instructions for describing how drawn objects scale, move and rotate over time. Tom DeFanti wrote the original version for his 1974 Ohio State University doctoral thesis on a PDP-11/45 driving a Vector General 3DR display, whose hardware could scale and rotate pictures in real time while the language supplied new scenery. Collections of drawing commands could be arranged in a hierarchy so that an effect applied to a whole tree of the image at once. After DeFanti moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle he worked with Dan Sandin at the Circle Graphics Habitat, later the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, and the language was coupled to the Sandin Image Processor. Nola Donato redesigned many control structures in 1977 as GRASS3. The artistic community took it up, and Larry Cuba used a GRASS system to make the Death Star briefing animation seen in Star Wars in 1977. A port for the Z Box of Midway became ZGRASS, with raster and sprite-like commands, and the last version, GRASS RT/1, separated the language from its display model and ran on several platforms.