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

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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