ANIMAC: Digital Puppetry in the 1960s

A dancer performs using ANIMAC - likely the world's first digital puppetry system - in 1962.

ACCAD at Ohio State University offers a course called A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation (link via BlenderNation). As you might expect, the course examines the history of the computer graphics, which stretches back much further than you might expect. The course section that I found to be the most interesting-looking was part twelve which looks at the work of Lee Harrison III, an computer graphics pioneer who in the 1960s developed ANIMAC, which was probably the world's first digital puppetry system.

A .pdf file with additional information about Lee Harrison and ANIMAC is available here.