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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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.
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