About

Global Wahrman is a collection of editorials and comments by computer animation pioneer Michael Wahrman.    He is a recognized pioneer of the field of computer animation in production as the field went from a curiosity to the dominant process of imagery production for visual effects and long form animation in media.   His background is in computer science, economics and political decision making with degrees of various types from UCLA.  He began his career at the RAND Corporation where he served in several capacities, including the director of the Information Systems Lab, the facility for computer science research at RAND.   Subsequent to that he worked at Robert Abel's and Associates, the Symbolics Graphics Division, founded his own company deGraf/Wahrman, inc. (dWi) and has consulted for such companies as IBM Research, Viacom New Media, Time Warner Interactive Technology, Walt Disney Imagineering, New York University, the Completion Bond Company, and many others.  As an adjunct professor he created three courses on visual effects at the NYU SCPS.   Among other inventions, he developed one of the earliest production animation systems in computer animation for which he won a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy, as well as a system for the live performance of computer generated characters in 1988 and a system for cross-platform production used at dWi.

Global Wahrman is intended to serve several different purposes including a venue to comment on various events and trends in the worlds of visual effects and computer animation, as a way to prototype several books that are in progress, as a way to document certain periods such as Los Angeles and computer animation in the 1980s, and as a general soapbox to discuss topics of long term interest to me, especially the fields of intelligence, counter-intelligence, historical linguistics and the entertaining area of "esoteric knowledge".

In a world that seems to spend a lot of time being hypocritical and self-serving on many topics of critical importance to our lives, and which seems to have a very selective memory of the past, I hope to in a small way be a voice of honest, and colorful, commentary on topics where I think I have something reasonable to say.   If its the history and purpose of computer animation and visual effects, or of the early history of the Arpa/Internet, its because I was there.   In other cases, I am merely an intelligent citizen of our culture who reads a lot.

I encourage people to comment on my posts, your comments are almost always interesting and would be a contribution to the blog.   For those of you who are just spamming or slandering, whatever, go ahead and waste your time.  Your actions are themselves of interest as you help document some of the wild insanity in the world in which we live.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I hope you find it entertaining and/or useful.