Russell Kirsch, the computer scientist best known as the inventor of the pixel, has died at the age of 91. Kirsch is credited with inventing the pixel in 1957, many years before modern computers existed that could use the technology as we know it today. Kirsch used the pixel to recreate a childhood image of his son, Walden Kirsch.

Born in 1929, Kirsch studied at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before working for the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). He joined the team that developed SEAC, the first store-programmed computer in the United States.

In 1957, he created a small black-and-white digital image of his son, just 2" x 2", consisting of an array of 176 x 176 pixels (via Oregon Live). Kirsch believed that a computer needed some kind of input device to convert the image into something suitable for storage.

The scanner used a rotating drum and a photomultiplier tube to sense reflections from a small image mounted on the drum. A mask placed between the image and the photomultiplier tube split the image into individual pixels," according to information from the NIST Museum's now-defunct Virtual Museum.

His son Walden Kirsch works for Intel in Oregon and provides many Intel images and stories on the web. Even if you don't recognize him as a young boy.

But even the inventor of the monumentally important invention known as the pixel misunderstands how this technology came to exist in its current form. Kirsch said that the square pixel was a bad idea to begin with: "I started with a bad idea, and that bad idea survived," Kirsch said (via Oregon Live).

Russell Kirsch is survived by his wife Joan and children Walden, Peter, Lindsay, and Kara.