Short answers, pulled from the story.
The phrase computer graphics was coined in 1960 by William Fetter, a graphic designer at Boeing, who in turn credited it to Verne Hudson, also at Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or in the context of film as computer-generated imagery, CGI.
Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, and the displays on cell phones and computers. It is also used to process image data from the physical world, such as photo and video, and appears in television, newspapers, weather reports, and medical investigations.
The University of Utah became the world's primary research center for computer graphics through the 1970s after recruiting David C. Evans in 1966 and Ivan Sutherland in 1967. Its advanced graphics class taught students who founded Pixar, Silicon Graphics, and Adobe Systems.
Edwin Catmull pioneered texture mapping to paint textures onto three-dimensional models in 1974, and it is now considered one of the fundamental techniques in 3D modeling. Catmull later took a founding role in Pixar.
NEC's microPD7220, fabricated on a fully integrated NMOS VLSI chip in the early 1980s, was the first GPU. It supported up to 1024x1024 resolution and laid the foundations for the emerging PC graphics market.
The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, released in 2001, was the first fully computer-generated feature film to use photorealistic CGI characters and be fully made with motion capture. The film was not a box-office success.
The ACM initiated the Special Interest Group on Graphics, SIGGRAPH, in 1969 to organize conferences, graphics standards, and publications in the field. The first annual SIGGRAPH conference was held in 1973.