The Challenge of Extreme Color Scarcity
In the early decades of personal computing, hardware constraints imposed severe color limitations. The 1984 Apple Macintosh 128K featured a built-in 9-inch monochrome monitor capable of displaying exactly two states per pixel: pure black or pure white.
To represent continuous-tone photographs, drop shadows, and subtle lighting on binary hardware, computer scientists developed spatial dithering—clever mathematical algorithms that trade spatial resolution for perceived tonal depth.