1. Robert John Lansdown was a British computer graphics pioneer, polymath and Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which was renamed in his honour in 2000.
10 Facts About John Lansdown
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John Lansdown pioneered the use of computers as an aid to planning; making perspective drawings on an Elliott 803 computer in 1963, modelling a building's lifts and services, plotting the annual fall of daylight across its site, as well as authoring his own computer aided design applications.
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John Lansdown joined the ACM in 1972 and Eurographics in 1983.
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John Lansdown had enormous influence as one of the founders of the Computer Arts Society in 1968, along with Alan Sutcliffe and George Mallen, and then as secretary of the Society.
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In 1977, John Lansdown became chairman of System Simulation Ltd the software company which, amongst other pioneering activities, had played a key role in the creation and development of the Computer Arts Society.
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At System Simulation John Lansdown then played a leading role in several pioneering animation projects, contributing to the flight deck instrumentation readouts on the Nostromo space ship for Ridley Scott's Alien, many advertising sequences and latterly, working with Tony Pritchett, producing the 3D wireframe drawings from which Martin Lambie-Nairn's original Channel 4 logo was rendered.
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John Lansdown was Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department of Architectural Science, University of Sydney in Australia, from 1983.
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John Lansdown relinquished these roles on formal retirement in 1995, but continued to be very active and influential as Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Electronic Arts.
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John Lansdown continued to advise System Simulation and to work on the development of a digital archive of the Computer Arts Society's history and holdings which the company had initiated.
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John Lansdown married Dorothy in 1952, and they had two children, Robert and Karen.