Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the pixel. Andrew Zolli's posted a fascinating history of the picture-element.
The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine–literally the glowing filaments of the machine's vacuum memory registers–but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world. Over the next five decades, we learned to shape our pixels to better reflect the 'real' world, even as we re-fabricated the world to more closely approximate those phosphorescent dots. The pixel became both a mirror and a lens, reflecting and shaping our reality. The result is a contemporary world more closely matched to the kinds of certainties pixels alone can render.
The social history of pixels has several interwoven themes. The first of these, ironically, concerns pixels' gradual disappearance. From early luminescent blobs on a screen, to points of light too small for the human eye to register, the pixel has been slowly dematerializing, losing mass and gaining verisimilitude.
(via Kottke)
