Digital Paint Systems: Historical Overview
Author(s): Alvy Ray Smith.
Misc: Tech Memo 14, May 30,
1997.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
The period I will cover is from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, from the beginnings of the technology of digital painting up to the first consumer products that implemented it. I include a little information about major developments in the later 1980s. Two surveys that cover this later period fairly well - when the emergence of the personal computer completely changed the software universe - were both published in the magazine Computer Graphics World. My emphasis, of course, is on those systems I knew firsthand. I begin with a simple timeline of programs and systems. I will attempt a weighting and a "genealogy" of these in a later section, where I will also narrow the field to those painting systems that have directly affected the movie industry.