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The first public performance
of a laser show took place on May 9, 1969,
at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Lowell Cross, Carson Jeffries, and David
Tudor created the show with a krypton laser
made by Coherent and X-Y scanners made by
Honeywell. According to Cross, the idea for
the show originated from a desire to add a
visual component to the public performance
of taped electronic music. He tried
oscilloscopes and television displays with
little success,
before meeting Jeffries in 1968. Jeffries
was a physics professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, and together they
built a system called Video/Laser. Tudor got
their second system, Video/Laser II,
commissioned for the Pepsi Cola pavilion at
Expo '70 in
Osaka,
where
it was seen by some two million people.
The
first two systems used modified strip-chart
recorder galvanometers for beam scanning.
Later
systems
used
moving-iron galvanometers from General
Scanning Inc. The signal sources
used to
drive the scanners were derived directly
from the music, a technique still in wide
use today. |
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