Russell Kirsch, Inventor of the Pixel, Passed Away This Week (petapixel.com) 44
Computer scientist Russell A. Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel and an undisputed pioneer of digital imaging, passed away on Tuesday in his Portland home from complications arising from a form of Alzheimer's disease. He was 91 years old. From a report: Russell Kirsch may not be a name that you immediately recognize, but his contributions to computer science made digital imaging possible. Born June 20, 1929 in New York City to immigrant parents from Russia and Hungary, Kirsch attended Bronx High School, then NYU, Harvard, and eventually MIT. In 1951, he joined the National Bureau of Standards, where he worked for 50 years and helped to invent the pixel and create the first digital photograph. This 172 x 172 pixel image of his son Walden -- created in 1957 -- is now iconic, and was named one of Life magazine's "100 Photographs That Changed the World" in 2003.
Christ (Score:3, Insightful)
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His son Walden. An ironic name for the child of a real pioneer:
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
2020 is cursed (Score:2)
The pixel? uh... no. (Score:5, Informative)
I have no doubt he left us with many advances but the concept of a pixel has been known for centuries.
when news papers print any image it is filtered through a grid, literally a peice of screen, and thresholded to convert a gray scale to a black and white printable image. All that used to be do photographically.
Just look at a printed image in any old news paper. Dots! all the dots are BLACK or WHITE. yet it looks gray scale to you. The dots will be different sizes for different intenisties but it's all a perfect grid of pixels.
you could write down this image just by going to each point on the grid and recording the size of the dot. and you'd have a tiff file.
Halftoning (Score:4, Informative)
the name for this is Halftoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
One of the interesting things about this is that news papers also had cut-and-paste departments which were basically a room sized version of photoshop.
So how do you enhance and image in pre-digital age. there were sort of two ways. You could paint on in, usually with an airbrush or white paint and enhance edges, remove blemishes and red-eye and lots of stuff by hand. could take another photo and cut it with a razor to paste it over parts of the existing image.
Or you could edit after the halftone. Now here you had to work in the pixel space. What they had were pre-printed films of dot arrays of a given size intensity. You cut little bits of this out with a razor and paste in onto the image.
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The video for Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm" shows some of that pre-digital image manipulation.
The cover of her compilation album "Island Life" was also a pre-digital photoshop.
Re:The pixel? uh... no. (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that they transmitted those pictures over telegraph in the late 1800s.
Alexander Bain [faxauthority.com] did his first experiments in 1843.
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You should know better by now, the slashdot editors are never going to read your post.
Clearly they don't even read the articles they post summaries of.
Russell Kirsch is credited with creating the digital pixel for raster image displays.
The definition on wikipedia is:
In digital imaging, a pixel, pel, or picture element is a physical point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in an all points addressable display device; so it is the smallest controllable element of a picture represented on t
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Inventor of the "pixel" NOT the "Pixel" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Inventor of the "pixel" NOT the "Pixel" (Score:3)
Re: Inventor of the "pixel" NOT the "Pixel" (Score:1)
I know I was like, how is that phone newsworthy? Also, no one man "invented" it.
Goodbye sir! (Score:1)
Seurat + Signat invented Pointillism in 1886 (Score:3, Informative)
These artists used small dots of colts to produce very amazing and beautiful paintings.
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The difference being that they didn't use a fixed grid or a digital representation for the purposes of creating an image on a VDU or doing image processing in computer memory.
Almost all advances are incremental, built on prior work.
Monet would like a word. (Score:1)
Not porn? (Score:1)
The first test image didn't involve porn or at least a shapely female form? That's a shock. Maybe it did, but nobody will admit it? Early cameras, early movies, early VCR's, early web etc. were propelled by smut. I bet lasers were invented for similar reasons, I just haven't figured out the M.O. yet. Taking accurate measurements? Or maybe JUST to mess with cats, the second most common use of the web. It's pussies all the way down.
Not porn (Score:2)
https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/niepce-heliograph/ [utexas.edu]. Live people move too much for such photographs.
A very light-insensitive process. Even primitive gum-bichromate would have exposed faster.
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Heh heh... well done.
Clearly, Freud was, simultaneously, a freak, and spot on.
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It didn't say it was a myth, only that there's no evidence it influenced the outcome of the Betamax vs. VHS battle.
Pixel? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wait what? Wasn't the pixel invented by those ancient artists who did mosaics? Probably some guy in the middle east, Mesopotamia or something. OK, so we are talking about the first electronic pixel? What was the Nipkow disc based on? OK if we don't wanna call those pixels, what was early the 1920 Bartlane cable picture transmission system made up of, pixels it had to be? OK and then there's color television, that was before 1940. Note I am sure this guy made major and important contributions to computer ima
Re: Pixel? (Score:2)
TVs used scanlines (vector graphics, think oscilloscopes and those old wireframe arcade games) a very different technology than pixels which are expressed as bits.
Also, mosaics are not uniform in the material size and shape (no grid). Tiles perhaps is the best analogue, but using it for storing and transmitting graphics was certainly novel when he did it.
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TVs used scanlines (vector graphics, think oscilloscopes and those old wireframe arcade games) a very different technology than pixels which are expressed as bits.
Scan lines are almost totally different from vector graphics, except that they both involve aiming the electron gun[s]. Besides the obvious (scanning vs. direct aiming from point to point) vector graphics are actually more like pixels because you set intensity programmatically instead of through analog means.
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Color television has a grid of dots of fixed size, meaning they obviously had the concept of an image made up of dots. How else would you represent an image in a computer if not a digital value? What was the wrong way to do it? Converting an analog voltage value to a binary value was known. So that can't be the breakthough .. representing the color of a pixel as a binary value? I mean assuming he was the first to implement it, it's still disingenuous to claim he "invented pixels" .. the person who had the i
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Analog TV signals were not treated as a series of dots. They were treated as a series of lines. It's very different when you consider how the data is transmitted, stored, and manipulated (programming example: streams versus bitmaps).
How do you invent a pixel? (Score:1)
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I expect Slashdot to be more careful with its headlines.
You must be new here. Slashdot has never been careful about anything.
Did he prefer square or rectangular pixels? (Score:2)
Did he prefer square or rectangular pixels?
Clarification (Score:5, Informative)
I think they mean the inventor of the word pixel not the concept.
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I think they mean the inventor of the word pixel not the concept.
Mod parent up
^^
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So which word?
Pixel is short for "picture element". Did he invent "picture element" and shorten it to "pixel" or did he just invent the shortened name?
Old graphics programmers never die (Score:3)
They just set their alpha to 0.
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so I will fade out
Re: Old graphics programmers never die (Score:2)
I'm using a bezier curve with a parameter > 1.
I'm dead.
J/K I'M BACK BITCHES!
Now I'm really dead.
FOOLED YOU AGAIN!
Bambi (Score:1)
On line memorial (Score:3)
You can visit it here [dell.com]
Not invented (Score:2)
The pixel is a pretty trivial concept that flows naturally from the wish to digitize 2D information. He started with a horizontal line which was a given and which is already a level of (horizontal) quantization. To complete the process he needed to quantize that line vertically. From that process pixels emerge naturally. So to me he didn't actually invent it.