How were images, apps, letters, and etc able to be put on the first ever computer screen?
Today if you buy a new device it already has images, numbers, text, and etc. and if you want to add images or make anything in general, you can do it with pre existing software and with the assistance from a computer screen. I could see that maybe the people who made the first ever computer screen had help from pre existing computers but how did they go about doing this? Did they manually put 1’s and 0’s into the hard drive? Is it magic?
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That’s pretty much a lesson on computer history. There’s a lot of material available about this. But roughly:
* Initially we make machines with one purpose only. Eg, they only add numbers.
* Then we make machines that can be rewired — you physically plug in the right thing in the right place to have the right effect.
* Then you have programmable machines where you can [toggle some switches](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUZrn7qTGcs) to store something in memory. It’s slow and error prone.
* Then you have storage media, like punched tape and cards. Just a piece of paper that automates the switches.
By the time you get to a hard drive, other storage media long existed, so by the time you make the first hard drive you have something to load data from into it.
The first magnetic media were empty from the factory, so when you got a floppy or tape, or an early hard disk it was a completely blank slate. One of the first steps was formatting — writing some base data to the media to make it usable, and give it structure. These days this comes from the factory.
The first computer display was an oscilloscope that had a spot that could be put anywhere on the screen by the computer writing the X and Y coordinates of the spot into the display circuit. The original Space Wars game from 1961 used this method. Soon after, display circuits were built that could show a page of text by writing the binary codes for all of the letters to the display circuit. The circuit contained a decoder called a character generator that would turn each letter’s code into an array of dots to be displayed on a modified television display. This was called a ‘glass typewriter’. Eventually memory chips became cheap enough in the late 1970s that it was reasonable to store an entire image in the display circuits. The first displays of this type had low resolution because memory still wasn’t really low cost. And storage then would have required an entire floppy disk to hold one image. People kept redesigning memories and disks to hold more data in the same space. And here we are.
Yes. It’s magic. We made a rock think. https://xkcd.com/722/
Here’s a computer history museum: https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing
Basically we started with applying power to a light, and then putting a switch there, and then adding switches that control those switches, more lights and switches. Gradually people kept adding to it and making it more useful and more general to the point and giving them more and more capabilities, to the point where people could write programs and share or sell them.
Now, you can type any topic into Google search or YouTube search and it can bring up things other people have written or made videos on, without someone having to write a new response to your question, and without any of those people needing to know how to manipulate the ones and zeros directly.
The first computer screens were so-called dumb terminals. They were basically a replacement for printer/teletype output. The screen would display a character at a time from the bottom of the screen and scroll up. The characters themselves were stored in a ROM as bitmap patterns.
the 8-bit guy did a video on that recently.
The Apple 1 computer
Prior to the time the first image scanner was designed in late 50s they hardly used displays to output images. Early displays output images of a fixed number of monochrome characters. A character image is just an 8×8 bit matrix. You draw it on paper and convert to 64 bits. They didn’t put those images into a hard drive (those didn’t even exist at that time). The display manufacturer would put them in the read-only memory of what we call these days a graphics card. Computer would send codes of characters to the “graphics card” to display.
Essentially, software had to say: “the top left pixel of the screen should be white, the next one should also be white, the one after that should be black…” etc etc. These days, deep down inside that exact thing is still happening, but we can borrow other people’s code to make it easier: you say “put this picture in this location on the screen” and someone else’s code knows how to follow those instructions pixel by pixel
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