Vector monitor

In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics.

His solution was able to produce fundamental waveforms using two deflection cowls a high-powered cathode inside of the tube to create a continuously swept image.

Vector graphics in computers first emerged with the Whirlwind system built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.

Utilizing oscilloscope tubes, the Whirlwind displays could produce complex readings of airborne trajectory, as well as played host to the first graphical demo, Bouncing Ball (1951).

It featured an analogue monochrome display with special electronics, designed by Sperry's John Atkins, that allowed it to draw vectors on screen between two pairs of coordinates.

At Farnborough the display was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Sperry 1412 military computer - it was shown running software that drew, in real time, a wire-frame rotating cube that could be speed-controlled in any of its three dimensions.

(The CRT has at least one flood gun, and a special type of display screen, more complicated in principle than a simple phosphor.)

Vector monitors were also used by some late-1970s to mid-1980s arcade games such as Armor Attack, Asteroids, Omega Race, Tempest, and Star Wars,[5] and in the Vectrex home videogame console.

The CRT had an internal, specially contoured, very fine mesh operating at low potential, which was placed after the deflection plates at the gun exit.

The Digistar planetarium projection system, made by Evans & Sutherland, was originally a vector display that could render both stars and wire-frame graphics.

[citation needed] Atari used the term color quadrascan to describe the shadow-mask version used in their video arcade games.