Memory Lane: Birth Of The Pixel
| Pixel
(from Mirriam Webster Dictionary) A combination of PIX [picture] and Element, meaning the smallest addressable unit on a display screen. The higher the pixel resolution (the more rows and columns of pixels), the more information can be displayed. In storage, pixels are made up of one or more bits. The greater this "bit depth," the more shades or colors can be represented. The most economical system is monochrome, which uses one bit per pixel (on/off). Gray scale and color displays typically use from 4 to 24 bits per pixel, providing from 16 to 16 million colors. On the screen of a CRT or LCD, pixels are made up of three dots of color RGB. Monochrome and gray scale systems use one dot per pixel. Pixels are energized with different intensities, creating a range from dark to light. creating a range of colors (perceived as the mixture of thee dots). Black is all three dots off, white is all dots on at max. IBM called them PELs, Picture Elements, but their terminology never caught on, by then IBM had lost its clout in the PC world, its last big name claim being VGA and to a lesser extent in the display market XGA. |
Our kids, the Y- and probably the X-generation have never known a world without them. Those glowing little imperceptible dots on our computers, PDAs, and just about every other display in our lives, except TVs, are as an intrinsic a part of our daily lives as is the mobile phone, the Web, and fast-food. But it wasn't always like this; it was worse, much worse, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
It's hard to say where or when the digital age began, you could say it started with Morse code (1835) followed by Baudot (in France in 1874), and Hollerith (1880) but I prefer to think it was Claude E. Shannon whose "Mathematical Theory on Communication," opened our minds to the power and benefits of quantized data. The idea of taking infinitesimal and infinite quantities and breaking them up into manageable chucks of data that we now commonly refer to as bits; although the true meaning of a bit is probably as lost as the awareness of the glowing dots on our screens. Dr. Claude E. Shannon (1917 - 2001) published his paper in ""1947 (while at Bell Labs.), and it took a few years for the rest of the world's scientists, mathematicians, and scholars to grasp its significance. And when they did they went crazy with it. Suddenly everything was data and the world had changed.
True Or False, On Or Off
The first to envision an electronic digital computer however was John V. Atanasoff (b. 1903), and his graduate student, Clifford Berry while they were at Iowa State College (now called Iowa State University). It was based on using Boolean algebra with computer circuitry. George Boole (1815-1864) clarified the binary system of algebra {The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854)}, which stated that any mathematical equations could be stated simply as either true or false. By extending this concept to electronic circuits in the form of on or off, Atanasoff and Berry had developed the first all-electronic computer by 1940. Their project, however, lost its funding and their work was overshadowed by similar developments by other scientists, most notably the ENIAC (1946) the first automatic electronic digital computer, developed at the University of Pennsylvania.
Atanssoff's and ENIAC were the first examples of programmable machines, but hard-wired digital computers had been built in 1941 during World War II by the by the German engineer Konrad Zuse who developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles, and In 1943, the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German messages.
But it was John Von Neumann who designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer EDVAC in 1945 with a memory to hold both a stored program as well as data. It used vacuum tubes, condensers, punch cards, and mercury delay lines for memory, but something better was needed.
