In those days, post-production facilities and suppliers in the Atlanta area were virtually nonexistent so Charlie and Don, along with the skills of a local machinist, Rudolph Dettmer, built a titling and animation stand out of a discarded X-Ray machine to satisfy the studio’s needs for animation and titling services. Although the homemade contraption worked well for simple tasks, it was woefully lacking when more extensive projects were attempted. Increased demand for professional titling and animation soon forced the studio to purchase a new Oxberry animation stand to expand capability and improve final quality.
Things progressed well for a while but the newfound capabilities of the Oxberry animation camera created a new problem: While there were several people within the company who could operate the animation equipment, it fell to Charlie to calculate the complex camera motions that customers were expecting in their animation projects. A few months of Charlie directing and shooting by day followed by long nights at a calculator doing animation layouts and it became clear that something had to give.
Charlie saw an article in "Business Week" magazine about the emergence of Mini-Computers from several manufacturers including Hewlett Packard. Hewlett Packard (HP) was well known to him because of his prior work in television so he decided to give the HP branch office in Atlanta a call to see if there was a way a computer could do the animation calculations.
Good news, bad news: The HP salesman felt it was possible to do the computing and contacted several programmers to see what it would cost to do the programming. The bad news was that the low bid was $50,000, with no guarantee of success. The computer was an additional $24,000 bringing the total to whopping $74k in the days when a brand new Rolls Royce could be had for about $20,000!
But there was a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a proposal from HP: If Charlie would take programming training from HP in California and purchase the computer, then HP would take the computer back if he couldn’t program it to do the job.
After a fairly steep learning curve, he was able to program the mini-computer to do the calculations and print a nicely formatted exposure sheet for the animation cameraman. Right about here is where a light went on: Could the instructions that created the printouts somehow actually control the equipment? The answer was yes but not quite that simple. Charlie, with help from Don had built a fire hazard of a control system out of stepping motors, reed relays and 12volt batteries; but it worked and there was nothing in the world like it.
