In the early 1960s digital computers became available to artists for the first time (although they cost from $100.000 to several millions, required air conditioning, and therefore located in separate computer rooms, uninhabitable studios; programs and data had to be prepared with the keypunch, punch cards then fed into the computer; systems were not interactive and could produce only still images).
The output medium was usually a pen plotter, microfilm plotter (hybrid bwn vector CRT and a raster image device), line printer or an alphanumeric printout, which was then manually transferred into a visual medium.