Is text one form of graphics?

Question

I don't know if this is the right stack exchange for this question, but I couldn't find a better one, so I am posting it here. My question is, is text considered a form of graphics? As I am writing this question, certain pixels on my computer are changing color from white to black. So, I assume text is considered a form of graphics. But is it really? And if it isn't, what is the general name for something that covers both text and graphics, that is to say, all forms of things that appear on a computer monitor?

Answer 1

All of these terms are reliant on context. In the context of modern computers, text is a form of graphics. But this has not always been the case.

Since before monitors existed, computer users had to have ways to get useful data out of computers. This would often involve specialized lights or something, but they eventually developed text output through a printer.

CRT television displays existed at the time of course. But the interface between the computer and such displays had to be mediated by highly specialized electronics. Computers of the day couldn't just devise a picture and shove it at the CRT. Some kinds of such electronics were able to take a simple stream of bytes from the computer, similar to the form a computer would use to print something, and convert it into readable text on a CRT.

And thus, a computer could display text.

As memory capacities and processing power increased, some early CRT-interface hardware was capable of reading certain memories and interpreting them as pixels for display. One could call this "graphics".

Some computers, particularly early home computers, had specialized modes for displaying text compared to arbitrary graphics. These sometimes represented different hardware display circuitry. And of course, there were sprite-and-tilemap systems used by early game console hardware like the NES, but that's a different (though related) animal.

Of course, as computers became more general-purpose and more capable, the need for specialized circuitry and modes to handle video display faded away. Everyone more or less landed on the same solution: write data into a specialized piece of memory, which display output hardware will read and display as pixels in some colorspace.