I appreciate the explanation, but it's not for me. I'm trying to find a good book to recommend to my grandkids. I've had fun teaching them how to use old retro computers (c64, Apple II, and such). It's been a fun experience, but I'd like to give them some references that aren't me! I've personally come a long way in my computing skills since I was staring at shiny new Pong screens :)
That's trickier - somewhere along the way I stopped buying books and just do tactical forays onto the net when I need a new bit of domain knowledge.
Details like how and why pixels work are much easier to understand and retain if they're in some kind of context. Gamers learn about pixels to better understand the games or their gear. Devs learn about them in order to control them. Artists learn about them to better understand why computers mangle their art. So maybe choose an area the grandkids are engaged with and look for something there that also touches on display tech.
Thinking of when I was 12 (2005?), microscopes and magnifying glasses helped me understand. Depends on device DPI (cell phones have an insane number of pixels per inch; desktop screens are usually less dense).
If you can zoom in enough to see subpixel elements, and pull up a color wheel, it's very intuitive to see that the screen is made of pixels, and the pixels are made of three elements.
I don't know about books, though. I remember reading the binary/computers chapter of How Things Work and being thoroughly confused at that age. There was some extended allegory about white mammoths and black mammoths.
Did you have The Way Things Work or The New Way Things Work? I had the latter around the same time. I thought the extended computer section (Bill's Gates!) was very helpful. I still really like the visual in which the image of a mammoth is turned into a series of pumpkin/no pumpkin signals being launched through the air, then becomes a picture of a mammoth on the other side of the field. I think it got a bit too technical for me when it started showing how transistors are constructed-- I guess I should've stuck with the pumpkins.
Now I have both editions and have looked through them side-by-side. It's a bit unfortunate that some pages were dropped to make room for the expanded digital section in the newer edition, but well worth the trade-off for more/better explanations in the digital realm.
Just took a look over my bookshelf, but they haven't made it with me through moves.
I do still have Incredible Cross-Sections. That was another of my favorites to flip through. It looks like there are reprints and new versions. Would definitely recommend for kids.
Graphics was somewhat more complicated back in the day. In the days before we had enough memory to hold a full screen framebuffer, there was a lot of magic going on with cathode ray tubes, video signals, dedicated hardware sprite engines, memory access clock cycles, using interrupt handling to "race the beam" and so on.
It's not like modern display panels and HDMI signals and digital protocols are simple, but you don't have to go into the details to understand how pixels and framebuffers work.
If you're trying to explain how pixels work, going back to 1980s era technology is a detour into arcane technical details that aren't really relevant any more. They're pretty cool to read about if you're into retro computer technology but they don't have much educational value or relevance to the modern day.
If they're interested in retro computers, you can always try finding some books from the 1980's. Many titles were written for children. The Apple II was also a fun playground for computer graphics since it was supported in BASIC.
