Back in 1982, computing was really going mainstream. Tron, the story of a computer programmer trapped inside a mainframe, was making millions at the box office; Commodore released the C64 – the highest-selling single computer model of all time; and an eight-year-old from Florida’s new high score on the arcade classic Pac-Man was such big news that it allegedly prompted a congratulatory letter from President Reagan.

But BBC show Tomorrow’s World was more interested in what the future of computing had to offer. In the video above they introduced viewers to the wonders of CGI. Now, by dicing TV images up into 625,000 pixels and rearranging them, three-dimensional, solid-looking images were a button push away – slashing weeks off the production time for whizzy TV animations.

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