Here’s a weird one: the word has nothing to do with computers originally. It’s from the Latin rastrum, a rake. Scrape, drag, rake. That’s it. Turns out old CRT monitors worked almost exactly like that. An electron beam dragged itself across the screen one line at a time, lighting up pixels as it went, the same motion as a rake pulled through dirt. Someone noticed the resemblance and the name stuck. A raster image, in plain terms, is just a grid of pixels. Nothing fancier than that. The whole idea traces back to Bell Labs in the late 1960s, where