Did you know that, over fifty years ago, a guy named Russel Kirsch scanned a photo of his baby son, and in so doing, he created the very first digital image?
And because he was the very first, he needed to decide what the pixels would look like. And he decided that they should be square, and thus today, whenever we look at a digital image, we see it rendered in square pixels.
Yes, it’s all Russel’s, fault, but never mind: he’s a good guy, and he recently apologised for doing this.
He basically says that although logical, this wasn’t the best choice of the options available.
Here’s a link to the full story on Wired.