The Compleat Angler (1978)

After receiving his Ph.D. from NCSU in 1978, Turner Whitted left for Bell Labs and proceeded to shake the CGI world with an algorithm that could ray-trace a scene in a reasonable amount of time. His film, The Compleat Angler is one of the most mimicked pieces of CGI work ever, as every student that enters the discipline tries to generate a bouncing ray-traced ball sequence.