How were images, apps, letters, and etc able to be put on the first ever computer screen?

Question

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?

In: 0

Answer 1

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.