posdamer@wucs2.UUCP (03/06/87)
My request for information about the infamous mandrill was answered by the following (edited) mail). For posterity: ****************************************************************** I can't help with the mandrill, but we found the original for the woman with the feather in her hat. Check out Miss November, 1972... _______________________________________________________________________ Jeff Posdamer inquired about the origins of the mandrill image. It is distributed on a mag tape supplied originally by USC (University of Southern California). Harry Andrews was a faculty member there at the time. He also founded (or co-founded) Comtal. The actual digitization was presumably done by an anonymous graduate student. A related fact: Another image on the tape shows a woman wearing a hat. This was the basis for the poster that appeared at SIGGRAPH '86 as the winner of the Raster Technology contest. The original source of the image is a Playboy centerfold. A recent issue of Playboy contains a recap of all centerfolds. (One of our graduate students told me this. He also managed to locate a back issue of the original, which has been digitized.) From seismo!weitek.UUCP!wallis Mon Feb 23 19:36:35 1987 Path: wucs2!wucs1!cuae2!clyde!rutgers!husc6!sri-unix!hplabs!decwrl!sun!imagen!auspyr!sci!weitek!wallis From: wallis@weitek.UUCP (Bob Wallis) Reply-To: wallis@weitek.UUCP (Bob Wallis) >in the fog and I am not sure I believed it at the time. Does anyone out >there KNOW (not guess or speculate) where, when and who digitized the >mandrill. That was me and a fellow named and Mark Sanders, some time back in the early 70s. I was one Bill Pratt's graduate students, and we scanned the monkey off the back page of a photography magazine, I think it was a advertisement for a Graphlex camera. We used a Muirhead drum scanner which was originally designed for use with a fax machine. The display we had was made by John Tahl when he was at Aerojet (the refresh memory was a magnetic drum). He later started his own company (Comtal), and adopted the mandrill image as sort of a logo. Harry Andrews ensured the image's immortality by including it among the standard USC test images that have ended up everywhere. Mark Sanders died in about 1975. Bob Wallis UUCP: {pyramid,turtlevax,cae780}!weitek!wallis ######################################################## From seismo!sun!cmcmanis@wucs1 Fri Mar 6 03:34:25 1987 Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View The Mandrill was digitized on a Muirhead image scanner at the Image Processing Institute at the University of So. Calif. At the time Harry Andrews was the director of the Institute. He was later succeeded by Dr. Allan Pratt. I worked their from Sept '78 to Feb '84 and re-digitized it on an Optronics scanner. It is included in the Institutes database of color pictures and was a particularly good example of high frequencies in a color image. Harry later went to work for Comtal, Dr. Pratt started ViCom, and now Dr. Sawchuk runs the place. Last time I checked the original picture was still in the lab in a drawer. -- --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.