Pixel Pump Story

Ivan the Inventor and the Pixel Pump
By Mr. Fide

Tim turned off his MP3 player, removed his earphones, and turned from his computer. His mother was working on a thesis for her graphic design course and was reading a magazine article about colour theory.

"Mum," asked Tim, "what's a pixel?"

Mum stopped what she was doing and looked thoughtful. Her eyes looked past Tim, out the window, past the green paddock across the road, and away off to the grey-blue shades of the distant mountains. Then a smile spread across her face as she looked back at Tim.

"Well Tim," she said, "would you like to hear the true story or the make-believe story first?"

"Oh, I want to hear the make-believe story first!"

..and so began the story of the Pixel Pump...

A long, long time ago - last century, big factories made thousands of monitors for thousands of computers for thousands of people. And for a long time, the screens were just black and white or sometimes green and white, because in those days they only had black and white and green pixels, and even these were scarce and very, very expensive.

There was a man called Ivan who used to live just along the road from here. He was a coalminer. He had a very old computer that had a monitor with 242 rows of pixels, and there were 512 of them in every row. I'm not sure where they got the pixels from in those days, but one day when he was at work, he noticed that if the light is just right and if you look very hard, you can see the colours of the rainbow in the black coal, and sometimes in the coal dust, and sometimes in the puddles outside the mine entrance after it had rained.

In his spare time, Ivan was an inventor. And one day while walking back from the mine after a hard day's digging, he thought, "If only there was a way to get those colours out! I could use them to make coloured pixels for my computer."

Big corporate giants were spending billions of dollars doing expensive research to find how to make coloured pixels. They employed lots of experts who worked away right around the clock to seek the solution to the problem of where to find them.

Ivan the Inventor didn't have any research funds or experts to help him.

But he had a brain.
He had imagination.
He was very creative.
And he had a garage.

One day Ivan left his job at the mine and disappeared into his garage. No-one else was allowed in. They left food for him on the old chair outside the door, and he passed messages out so they would be found on the doorstep.

He stayed in his garage for ages. And ages.

Then one day, he passed a note out under the door. The note said...

"It's finished. Please send a big tarpaulin and order a hire truck. And don't tell anyone!"

And it was signed, "Ivan"

The next day, Ivan the Inventor drove out of his garage in a hire truck. On the back he had something covered in a big tarpaulin, tied down tightly.

He drove off down the road, past our place, past the paddock over the road, and away into the distance.

Years passed.

Meanwhile, millions of monitors for millions of computers for millions of people with millions of colours began flooding the market. And Ivan was never heard from again.

More years passed.

Someone said he had been seen in the Bahamas. Someone else said they saw him on a big super-yacht at the America's Cup village in Auckland. But all the sightings went unconfirmed. Nobody really knew what became of him.

.................

Last year, over there towards the mountains, some archaeologists were investigating an old quarry near some mines and they came across some machinery lying in the scrub. It was overgrown with ivy, blackberry, and all sorts of other stuff and it was pure luck that they found it at all. Bits had fallen off. It was very rusty. And lying amongst the bits and pieces they found a brass plaque that had engraved in it

"PIXEL PUMP MK III, SN1993IVAN256C"

They've done lots of research but they still aren't absolutely sure how it was used. They've published an interactive reconstruction of how it might have worked, and they hope that others will contribute ideas to help solve the puzzle.

There's a copy of it here on your computer if you want to check it out.

"Gee thanks mum! I think will."

So Tim's mum returned to her study. Tim began to explore the Pixel Pump, researched the internet and found out heaps about pixels and colours and stuff like that.