When you’re diving into the history of computing and its concepts, you rarely have to look much further back in time than the Second World War. It happens sometimes, but not that often. However, there are exceptions – and this is one that really boggles the mind: the pixel? One of those little dots on your screen? It’s well over 400 years old.
Making letters and numbers appear pretty, rounded, and anti-aliased on a screen is much harder than you would think – you only need to look at the different methods and styles of font anti-aliasing in various graphical environments (and its supporters… Always the supporters…) to realise that it’s never perfect – far from it, in fact. The funny thing is though, this struggle to put a round peg in a square hole (what rendering fonts with pixels actually is) is a lot older than you’d think.
Jonathan Hoefler, of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, has dug up an example of pixel-based font rendering from 1567, found in an embroidery guide written by Giovanni Ostaus.
As Hoefler explains:
Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment. Ostaus’s alphabet follows the cardinal rule of bitmaps, which is to always reckon the height of a capital letter on an odd number of pixels. (Try drawing a capital E on both a 5×5 grid and a 6×6, and you’ll see.) Ostaus ignored the second rule, however, which is “leave space for descenders.”
While not dealing with pixels in a technical sense (as in, digital imaging), Ostaus did effectively work with the same limitations, and had to take the same arguments into account when designing this typeface as his modern colleagues in digital typography do. Simply fascinating.
You dare trick us with a broken link?
Works fine for me, and is a very interesting read.
I’d always thought the logical precursor to the pixel is the mosaic which dates back to the 4th century B.C.
If that’s so then I think their count is a little off…
Yeah, I thought about mosaic art too… Although it wasn’t always pixellated, most of it was tesserated.
methinks a mosaic is more ‘free-style’ – it’s not like the stones are arranged in a matrix with equal numbers per line; or without straight lines of stones all together.
Pointillism is a popular late 19th century technique of painting with quite large (5-10mm) adjoining coloured dots. A dozen or so different colours are normally used. Up close you just see the dots but they form a nice image at arms length.
But they are not on a grid, right? That’s a huge difference.
This is not surprising to me at all. Digital technologies were there for hundreds of years – just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom“>Jacquard .
To be even more precise, J.M. Jacquard “only” automated the pattern transfer into the fabric by using a mechanical device with punched cards.
Manual creation of such fabrics existed for over two thousand years. To make any such fabric, a sketch is necessary, since it is impossible for a weaver to make complex designs out of his/her head.
The “pixels” in textile sketch are rectangular, to reflect the density of weaving. So pixels can also be square, but more often they are not.
Weaving of carpets also requires the same kind of pixel-based sketch.
Check the wikipedia entry on tapestry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry
for some pictures of old tapestries.
As does needlepoint. A friend of mine got me into needlepoint (briefly) some years back, claiming that it was “relaxing”. Unfortunately, I did not find it so. It’s essentially turtle graphics. Invariably, during a session, I would make a mistake, and then do about a hundred more stitches before I noticed… at which point I would have to tediously back the “turtle” up 100 stitches to correct the error and then redo them all correctly. If I wasn’t in an aggravated state at the start of the session, I was surely so by the end.
Latch-hook rug making might be more to my liking. I had not considered it before, thinking it similar to needlepoint. But rug making is essentially raster graphics with random access to individual points. Maybe I should try it out?
Edited 2008-11-23 18:11 UTC
It sort of reminds me of the article I read once about the Egyptians somehow “using” Pi to construct their pyramids. Turned out that they didn’t have direct abstract knowledge of Pi, but were rather using measuring wheels to set the massive construction dimensions. The wheels then forced Pi’s relationships into the pyramids. Here you have a craftsman faced with the challenge of making an image from interconnected yet discrete pieces. He does the (repeatedly) logical thing, and bam! You have “pixels”.
I wonder if he thought, “Wow! This would look great on a properly-designed OLED screen!”
Nihil nova sub sola.
Just in case you did a double-take on that alphabet image in the article, there were indeed 24 letters in the (medieval) Latin alphabet (no J or U) – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_alphabet
Actually there was no J or W in the Latin alphabet. Hence the letter W is called (and often written as) ‘double U’.
Italian doesn’t use J either. The letter G is pronounced like the English letter J.
You forgot quantum mechanics.
No quantum mechanics, no modern computing.
I wonder if this is one of the patents Microsoft has claimed they innovated.
“I wonder if this is one of the patents Microsoft has claimed they innovated.”
No, this patent is held by ISI. Google is your friend…
Fascinating, but I missed the part where pixels are dying? I guess I don’t keep up with technology news enough.
Looks to me like there are far more pixels on earth than ever before. I think the author means that they are so small that we no longer have to care about them, or exactly how they are positioned. Right… Then why are are the OSAlert right side bar fonts so grainy when I view them in Opera? And why do we argue back and forth about whether antialiased fonts are better or just blury? And why do we use things like subpixel smoothing? And why did the otherwise seemingly non-technical woman ahead of me in line at Whataburger yesterday make a casual comment about her 1080p TV? Far from dying, nontechnical people are *learning* about pixels. About megapixels, even. It seems to me that pixels are poised to rule the world, or at least demand the vote.
Edited 2008-11-24 17:01 UTC