Popular Science in 1973 had an interesting article¹ on cutting-edge computer visualization, including a star-data image similar in style to the Joy Division image, except in perspective and with different data. The article describes new technology that allowed "fantastic" visualization with 7 colors.

The Joy Division style 3-D surface plots were a pretty standard computer graphics thing in the 1970s, often with lines in the Y direction too making a grid. They had the advantage of being pretty easy to program and not requiring a lot of memory - just start drawing lines at the front and keep track of the highest point at each X position. A function such as a damped sinusoid makes a nice image this way.

I'm impressed by the author's tenacity and research, but a library would have really helped him out. Also, I'm puzzled why he thinks the lack of a © on the image itself matters - magazines usually have something like "Entire contents copyright" in the masthead.

¹ http://books.google.com/books?id=IWxyanKoRUoC&lpg=PA104&...