Aaron Marcus

Aaron Marcus (born 22 May 1943) is an American user-interface and information-visualization designer, and a computer graphics artist.

Biography

Marcus grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1950s. In secondary school he studied both science and art, and was editor of his high-school newspaper.

He graduated with an A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1965 after completing a senior thesis. He obtained BFA and MFA in 1968 at Yale University School of Art and Architecture.

At Yale he also began the study of computer graphics, taking a course in basic functioning of computers, and he learned FORTRAN programming at the Yale Computer Center in the summer of 1966.

Career

In 1967, Marcus spent a summer making ASCII art as a researcher at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

From 1968 to 1977, Marcus taught at Princeton University in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning and in the Visual Arts Program.

In 1969-1971, he programmed a prototype desktop publishing page-layout application for AT&T Bell Labs, and in 1971-1973, while a faculty member at Princeton, he claims to have programmed some of the first virtual reality art/design spaces.

In the early 1980s, he was a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, as well as a faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.