The Dawn of Digital Light
Alvy Ray Smith · IEEE Annals of the History of Computing · 2015
Digital pictures and computers are now inseparable, so it's surprising how generally unremarked their association was in the beginning. Records reveal that the first digital pictures--the first still pictures, videogames, and computer animations--were made on the earliest computers. Historians have noted this before, but individually without a unifying context. This article shows that the original digital pictures were associated with the original computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This fresh perspective on digital pictures establishes a different take on the history of early computers and unifies the history of digital light itself.