{"id":9430,"date":"2022-07-05T11:40:45","date_gmt":"2022-07-05T15:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/?post_type=class-note&p=9430"},"modified":"2022-07-05T11:53:49","modified_gmt":"2022-07-05T15:53:49","slug":"douglas-mcilroy-54","status":"publish","type":"class-note","link":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/update\/douglas-mcilroy-54\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas McIlroy \u201954"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ken Knowlton ’52, BEP ’53, MS ’55, died recently. His role as a pioneer of computer-generated movies is well told in a New York Times<\/em> obituary<\/a>. Though Knowlton was a year ahead of me in EP, I did not meet him until we were grad students at MIT. We would later enjoy facing offices at Bell Labs. Ken was endlessly creative. Besides his pioneering computer graphics, I particularly remember the eerie feeling of typing at a special keyboard he made, on which you could read the keytops right through your fingers\u2014good for instantly switching among alphabets. The trick was to project symbols onto the keytops through a half-silvered mirror above the keyboard that reflected the symbols to your eyes so you’d see them and your fingers simultaneously. douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas McIlroy \u201954: “Ken Knowlton ’52, BEP ’53, MS ’55, died recently. 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