Long before Adobe and Autodesk had After Effects and Flame there was the Quantel Paintbox. My first job was at The Weather Channel in the mid 90s, and I got to paint with pixels on a Quantel Harriet. The Harriet had a Ramcorder (the precursor to the RAM Preview) of 383 frames which allowed for realtime playback and it had a live video out direct to air (which luckily I only had to use once). My mentor at The Weather Channel told me a story about their first year with the very first Paintbox in use at a broadcast network back in the early 80s. Their in-house art department won 26 Gold BDA awards that year. The serial number on the Paintbox was number 1. MTV was one of the other few early adopters of the Paintbox. We later transitioned to Apple Macintoshes, replacing all of the legacy SGI hardware with much less expensive gear.
Interesting article about artist David Hockney and the Quantel Paint Box here.
ABOVE IMAGE © QUANTEL.