If the photographic paper of your old pictures is faded, computerize and improve it.

In 1950  the engineer Russell A. Kirsch led a project team at US National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology) for developing the first programmable computer in America, the  SEAC (Standards Electronic Automatic Computer) to experiment algorithms for the National Government Agencies.

Russell A. Kirsch

SEAC used only 747 vacuum tubes (a small number for the time) eventually expanded to 1500 tubes. It had 10,500 germanium diodes which performed all of the logic functions. The machine used 64 acoustic delay lines to store 512 words of memory. Every word being 45 bits in size and The clock rate was kept low (1 MHz). Therefore the SEAC would be used to solve more than 50 different unrelated scientific problems for a variety of users.

SEAC (Standard Eastern Automatic Computer) and SEAC image scanner

In 1957 laboratories and commercial establishments used the computers, beacause  they had to digitalise documents by the character recognition logic. This required an input device that could transform a picture of a character into a form suitable for storage in the memory of a computer. The first Image Scanner for SEAC was born. It used a rotating drum and a photomultiplier to sense reflections from a small image mounted on the drum. A mask interposed between the picture and the photomultiplier tessellated the image into discrete pixels. A staticizer connected to the SEAC memory enabled a stored image which appeared on a cathode ray oscilloscope. This made it possible for the researchers to see what the computer “saw”.  Nonetheless the first pictures ever scanned and redisplayed before represented a feel for the age and maturity of the image processing field was. It was the Kirsch‘s newborn son.

Kirsch’s newborn son

On the other hand, the limited memory capacity of SEAC dictated that the scanner represent images as rectangular arrays of size 176 x 176 square binary pixels, each of size 0.25 mm x 0.25 mm.