POLYGRAPHICS was developed by a set of students at the Polytechic Institute of Brooklyn (PIB) under the direction initially of Ed Zajac (who was visiting from Bell Labs) initially and later by Ludwig Braun specifically for generating computer animation. PIB provided a low cost service to other academic institutions to produce movies for them from magnetic tapes generated via Polygraphics. It was widely used by other universities and government departments as a higher level interface to the SC4020 than the SCORS package. Michigan also developed a storage tube output facility for Polygraphics.
The GROATS system of the Atlas Computer Laboratory was largely an implementation of Polygraphics in Algol. The main difference was that the region definitions in GROATS were hierarchical.
The Polygraphics User's Manual was written by Frank Sarno. There was also a paper giving the main features in UAIDE68
At the Atlas Computer Laboratory, Polygraphics was implemented for users of the IBM 360/195. Later a SMOG backend was written to interface Polygraphics to the FR80.