The Dawn of Digital Light

Digital pictures and computers are now inseparable, so it's surprising how generally unremarked their association was in the beginning. Records reveal that the first digital pictures--the first still pictures, videogames, and computer animations--were made on the earliest computers. Historians have noted this before, but individually without a unifying context. This article shows that the original digital pictures were associated with the original computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This fresh perspective on digital pictures establishes a different take on the history of early computers and unifies the history of digital light itself.