TIL that the world’s first ever digital image was created in 1957 using a rotating drum scanner and the U.S.’s first fully operational stored-system computer. Resolution was 176 x 176 pixels - iPhone cameras default to around 5600 x 4200 pixel images for perspective.

Posted by LoudRevolution9163@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 23 comments

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c64z86@reddit

That baby will be all grown up now. I wonder what they think today of beign the first ever person to be photographed digitally?

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wentthererecently@reddit

Walden Kirsch was, for a long time, a local news reporter for KGW-TV in Portland Oregon. Here is a local article from a few years ago about this. https://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/erry-2018/05/9e71d5e0cd475/creator_of_worlds_first_digita.html

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impreprex@reddit

The Korn system? What the hell is that? Does it also come with growling vocals?

But seriously, what was the Korn system??

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LoudRevolution9163@reddit (OP)

Hi -- Where do you see “Korn system” mentioned? I missed that...

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jfoust2@reddit

I disagree. You could send a photo over a teletype circuit in 1920.

https://www.hffax.de/history/html/bartlane.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bartlane_system&oldformat=true

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Stoney3K@reddit

A fax is analog, so it doesn't qualify as a 'digitized' image.

Just like televisions existed way before 1957.

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jfoust2@reddit

It's not a fax. It stores the pixel levels on paper tape. It can be replayed.

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Stoney3K@reddit

It's still not a scanning mechanism but a photographic process to make an electrical copy of the image, which is then punched to paper tape.

The holes in the paper tape represent parts of the image directly, so there is no digitization going on, and no processing in a computer.

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jfoust2@reddit

Uhm, a drum scanner is still a photographic scanning mechanism. The SEAC scanner was only one bit deep. https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821692

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With "photographic" I mean a chemical process. The Bartlane process is not a real-time scanning system, it had to expose photographic media and then chemically develop it, instead of a scanner that works in real-time through photo-electric effect.

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jfoust2@reddit

The SEAC system was a drum scanner, too, scanning a chemical photograph. Are you debating the importance of the output display method?

I'd also suggest that the picture shown above is not the 0/1 one-bit 176x176 pixel image they made. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a photograph of a screen.

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SomePeopleCallMeJJ@reddit

True for very early fax machines, but by the time they became ubiquitous in the '80s, they were genuinely digitizing the image into a bitmap, and then modulating that data into an analog signal that could be transmitted over the phone lines. On the receiving end, they'd demodulate it back into digital data before printing.

(Which is why a lot of fax machines are also scanners that can send the image to your computer. They're basically a scanners with modems attached.)

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