The first digital cat was born in 1968.
Today is Global Cat Day.
We all know how much the trenches love animals. Especially cats.
Cats have become a huge part of internet culture, spawned thousands of memes, and even keep appearing in the names of new AI models.
But I want to remind you of one true OG that most people have never even heard of.
KITTY — 1968.
58 years ago.
Back in 1968, long before personal computers became a part of everyday life, a group of Soviet mathematicians led by Nikolai Konstantinov created one of the earliest examples of computer character animation.
And that character was a cat.
To bring KITTY to life, scientists mathematically calculated the movements of its body and legs.
The BESM-4 computer processed the calculations and printed hundreds of frames on paper using ordinary characters.
Those frames were then photographed and transformed into an actual animated film.
This is how KITTY came to life — one of the earliest computer-animated characters in history.
And all of this happened before the internet.
Decades before the first cat memes, YouTube, and memecoins, a cat was already moving through a computer-generated animation.
Today, technology has reached generative AI, and cats are still part of digital culture.
Cats were part of the digital world long before the internet made them famous.
$KITTY
THE FIRST DIGITAL CAT. 1968.
