Quantel products were designed and manufactured in Berkshire, England, in a factory that originally built parts for the Spitfire in World War II. Everything about the video below-from the green-screen environment to the spokespersons' clothes and hair-show exactly how dated (and expensive) the future can be. The flying logos and the onscreen graphics it produced prove that even the most forward-thinking machines, from the first printing press to the telephone, do not stay contemporary forever. Yet while it was the future of technology then, today it is an example of shadow-ridden, faux-handmade '80s aesthetics. It caused a stir among designers because of its speed and versatility. Quantel's Paintbox was the first system to employ special-purpose hardware for acceleration of digital painting and the first to utilize a pressure sensitive pen, which controlled all screen-based menus. It was not the first digital paint system-Richard Shoup created his 8-bit paint program SuperPaint at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1973, and Alvy Ray Smith had implemented the first 24-bit RGB paint system Paint3 at the NYIT in 1977.

Paintbox typography/graphics expert Pepper Howard.Īdrian Wilson, photographer, early Paintbox adopter and current street artist, alerted me to the fact that this is the program's fortieth anniversary: In 1981 Quantel launched the true-color, real-time digital system. As well as other firsts, they created a digital framestore in 1975, which for the first time enabled broadcasters to combine two live videos into one digital moving image. The name Quantel derives from Quantised evision, in reference to the process of converting a television picture into a digital signal. Quantel was a British company established in 1973, which created digital broadcast equipment. Quaint by today's standards (in terms of its logo, hardware design and graphic output), the product celebrated here was the envy of digital designers everywhere. The Quantel Paintbox made 'graphics' designers-especially motion and kinetic ones-specialized professionals within the broadcast industry. Whether you think in a box or out of one, the Quantel Paintbox was a late–20th century marvel put into service at ABC Sports. Some of the resulting images turn somersaults a gold medal gymnast would be proud of.' - Alex Ward For up to 20 hours a day, they have been assembling words, pictures and symbols on machines with space-age names like the Quantel Paintbox, the Dubner CBG (for Character Background Generator) and Chyron. 'For the past three years, a team of artists and engineers has been cloistered on the fifth floor of the ABC studios at 70th Street and Broadway, preparing first for the Winter Olympics last February in Sarajevo and then the summer Games.

Dateline: July 22, 1984, The New York Times.

Quantel Editing