Pixels REbabbled
First off, I'd like to announce that the debbablog's comments feature is finally working, so fire away. I tried to keep the process simple and painless for now, so you only need to enter a nickname and your comment. Just try to behave yourselves, and don't make me pull this blog over!Today is also an experiment of sorts. As a computer science major in college, I was always interested in why things were named the way they were. Unfortunately, computer scientists just aren't that interesting sometimes (or, at least, they weren't in the 80's), and I was often disappointed to learn the rather mundane origins of common terms. So, to amuse myself and confuse my friends, I began to invent my own, more creative, origins. Just for fun, I'm going to post some of these stories (maybe every other week or so). Today marks the first in the REbabbled series: the story of the pixel.
The Story of the Pixel
The Cathode Ray Tube or CRT, the technology behind almost all pre-LCD TV's and computer monitors, is something we've become so accustomed to that we rarely wonder how it works. Unfortunately, when you're a computer science professor teaching a class on basic principles of computer graphics, you don't have that luxury. Dr. Aldus Pixton, finally tired of the blank stares from students as he described the raster scan process (where an electron beam moves rapidly across a computer monitor, "drawing" the image you see), decided to develop an analogy. Imagine, he said, that a tiny elf lives in your computer monitor. That elf, being a bit hyperactive, likes to run across the screen from side to side, gradually moving downwards as he hits the sides. As the elf runs, he carries a tiny bucket of overflowing paint (elves being an artistic bunch), which slowly spills out, "painting" the picture you see on the monitor.
Dr. Pixton's simple analogy for the process inherent in all CRT's quickly spread, gradually coming to be known as "Pixton's Elf". The computer science community adopted the term and began to call the individual bits of a computer screen Pix-El's, which was eventually simplified to just pixels.
Really?
No. Sadly, the pixel, the smallest unit of graphical "stuff" on a computer screen, is just a shortened version of "picture element". It's an elemental unit, and it's part of a picture. Ho-hum. If you're not a programmer, you will generally see pixels referred to when talking about screen resolution (e.g. "my monitor is set to 1024 x 768 pixels").
