Next year, the pixel turns fifty years old. Cool.
Though it may seem like a more recent creation, the pixel first appeared in New Jersey in 1954, the same year that Elvis cut his first record and the transistor radio was invented. At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, mathematicians and engineers created the first computer graphic–and the first instance of digital typography–on a computer the size of a Manhattan apartment.
The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine–literally the glowing filaments of the machine’s vacuum memory registers–but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world.
[…] Along the way, significant parts of our culture became tied to our ever-shrinking pixels. Generations of youths constructed their social identities by their computer screen’s dimensions. I, for instance, belong to the ‘low-rez’ generation; a group of 30-somethings that grew up with Apples and Commodores, 200×300 pixel screens, 16-color displays, and the first ever home videogame consoles.
It is nearly impossible to ‘see’ the pixels that we in the low-rez generation witnessed, because experiencing them the first time around was a feat of mental construction as much as it was an act of visual perception. Hinted at by clever graphic design and completed by our childhood imaginations, three grey pixels next to an on-screen object became a deep shadow, implying a sun, a surface, a physics–a whole world suggested by a few carefully placed dots.
Heck, icon creators still have to work with that limited a pallette.
Still, the “picture element,” though a hi-tech version of pointellism, is a pretty cool concept, and one that is fundamental to computers as we know them today.
(via BoingBoing)