Ein Artikel über die Geschichte der ersten Pixel inklusive Twist am Ende:
"Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry. More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world [...] The square pixel became the norm, thanks in part to Kirsch, and the world got a little bit rougher around the edges ... "Wie ein überarbeitetes digitales Bild mit "variabel geformten" Pixeln aussieht, zeigt Russell Kirsch an Hand seines mittlerweile 53 jährigen Sohns:
Kirsch made that first digital image using an apparatus that transformed his picture into the binary language of computers, a regular grid of zeros and ones. A mere 176 by 176 pixels, that first image was built from roughly one one-thousandth the information in pictures captured with today’s digital cameras. Back then, the computer’s memory capacity limited the image’s size ...
Yet science is still grappling with the limits set by the square pixel. “Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility [...] but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”
Now retired and living in Portland, Ore., Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels ..." Science News: Circling the square
(via Make und Wired)
