Current computer graphics are fairly well known and understood. But how did we get here? The evolution of computer graphics is intertwined with textual display, and it is difficult to consider the two separately.
An old saying has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. The exact quantification of the value of imagery versus text appears to vary somewhat with subject matter, and is probably better left to psychologists and social scientists. But there is little question of the kernel of truth in the saying, and it has been a driver of computer architecture for many years.
Computer graphics are taken for granted today. But it has been a long and painful struggle, with hardware rarely keeping up with the demand for better images. In English, there are a relatively small number of characters which comprise text. The same is not true of images: graphics are computationally intensive. They always seem to take as much speed and memory as there are available. But the demand was high enough that early computer graphics could be fairly crude and still be in demand.
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