Bresenham's line algorithm determines which points on a 2-dimensional
raster should be plotted in order to form a straight line between two given points, and is commonly used to draw lines on a computer screen. It is probably one of the earliest algorithms discovered in the field of
computer graphics.
The algorithm was developed by Jack E. Bresenham[?] in 1962 at IBM. In 2001 Bresenham wrote:
- "I was working in the computation lab at IBM's San Jose development lab. A Calcomp plotter had been attached to an IBM 1401 via the 1407 typewriter console. [The algorithm] was in production use by summer 1962, possibly a month or so earlier. Programs in those days were freely exchanged among corporations so Calcomp (Jim Newland and Calvin Hefte) had copies. When I returned to Stanford in Fall 1962, I put a copy in the Stanford comp center library.
- A description of the line drawing routine was accepted for presentation at the 1963 ACM national convention in Denver, Colorado. It was a year in which no proceedings were published, only the agenda of speakers and topics in an issue of Communications of the ACM. A person from the IBM Systems Journal asked me after I made my presentation if they could publish the paper. I happily agreed, and they printed it in 1965."
Bresenham later modified his algorithm to produce circles.
There are several other known line-drawing algorithms including Xiaolin Wu's line algorithm, which is faster.
See: Visual Basic code, C code