When we browse through our favorite pictures on a modern display, we stare at millions of tiny illuminated areas on the computer screen. These minute illuminated areas on a display are what we call “pixels”. And the inventor of this revolutionary technology recently passed away.
So, in the year 1957, to answer his own wonderment of “what would happen if computers could see the world the way we do?”, he was working on a drum scanner at the NBS (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology). To test out his creation, he brought a physical photograph (below) of him and his recently born son, Walden Kirsch to the office. Image: NIST | Via: Washinton Post
So, following the experiment, Kirsch and his team published a paper about it in 1957 titled “Experiments in Processing Pictorial Information with a Digital Computer”. You can check out the research paper on the official website of the Computer History Museum.
