How a ‘Playboy’ Centerfold Became Part of the Creation of the JPEG

In her new book , How Sex transfer the Internet and the cyberspace convert sexual activity : An Unexpected History , Samantha Cole hunt the twisting chronicle of the “ Lena Centerfold , ” an range of a function from Playboy that became an international standard for preparation computers to know figure of speech . The mental image , taken in 1972 , persisted for decades in computer science , even inspiring op - eds in 2015 from engineering pupil . The image and its ubiquity come in to symbolize sexism and male domination for many young women entering the field .

And as for the woman herself , Lena ? Read on to see how she became a stranger to her own ikon .

In 1972 , Lena Sjööblom took a molding spear with Playboy , posed for a nude photograph , got the payroll check , and move on with her life .

The Lena test image. The original is a 512 by 512 pixel square.

The Lena test image. The original is a 512 by 512 pixel square.Photo: Dwight Hooker, 1972

It was the first and last time Lena posed au naturel . She change by reversal down a personal invitation from Hugh Hefner to visit his residence . She require more gigs with Kodak , posing for “ Shirley Cards ” ( call for the first model to baffle for one , a white , brunette Kodak employee name Shirley Page ) that helped technicians fine-tune the lighting and color balance on film . Her friends think the Playboy anecdote was a fun scrap of small beer , but for Lena that photo was in the past tense .

But for the rest of the world , Lena was exchange the net .

A few calendar month after that issue of Playboy strike stands , at the University of Southern California ’s Signal and Image Processing Institute , electric engineer Alexander Sawchuk and his team were work on image - processing algorithm for computers . They used “ test images”—a specific set of exposure shared across imaging labs , so that each lab was working from the same standard — to put their image compression algorithms through their paces . The team ’s body of work would eventually contribute to the development of the JPEG file cabinet format , one of the most common image data formatting we still use today .

Image: Courtesy of Workman

Image: Courtesy of Workman

None of the historical retellings of Lena ’s story seems to include ( or need to give away ) who , exactly , brought the Playboy to bring that day . But most accounts agree that when they needed a raw image to skim into a Hewlett - Packard 2100 minicomputer , the November 1972 result of Playboy was chosen for convenience . They were bore with the old trial run image and desire a photo with a human face , interesting textures , and a glossy finish to test the limits of the technology . The centrefold was perfect .

They thin out Lena ’s picture out of the cartridge from her shoulder up , effectively making the picture safe for workplace . Some have attributed the harvest line of work to smack or tact ; more probable , it was a technical matter . The top 5.12 inches of the Thomas Nelson Page fit into the Muirhead wirephoto image scanner , making a 512 x 512 pixel image .

The look-alike suited their design so well , they give the CAT scan to other research worker working on similar trope processing task , and it finally travel so wide that it was swallow as a standard across the diligence . There were other tryout mental image in consumption at the time , but Lena became the plant criterion that science laboratory around the country could agree on . Part of her enduring legacy is propelled by controversy . Over the course of two decades , Lena ’s image spread quietly and uncontrollably before Playboy even remark . By the time the publishing company did notice , when the deal magazine Optical Engineering put Lena on its July cover song in 1991 , it was too late for them to try on to reel her back in — the publisher gave permission for educational and inquiry purpose rather .

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But copyright violation was n’t the cause for arguing . With the technical school worldly concern ’s dot - com plosion offering promising futures for all at the same time , women were world - building , lead , and hosting BBS servers , MUDs , and their own web site right there with the old boys ’ club . But women still were n’t seen as adequate competitors and workfellow with their manly counterparts in the figure workforce . The Lena mental test ikon , some argued , was just another artefact of the heedlessly patriarchal thinking that had ruled the last thirty days . Some ask the image be pull away .

For age , Lena herself had no idea any of this was happening . She was living softly in Sweden , incognizant of the ruckus her photoshoot had stir among computer geeks in the US . It was n’t until she was ask round to the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997 that she understand the range at which her range was being used , permit alone as the gold standard for more than twenty geezerhood . She ’d never even reach the internet until then .

The conference was a phantasmagoric experience for Lena , chiefly because all these people , mostly bloodless male engine driver , had never considered her real , strong-arm macrocosm before . They were meeting the Weird Science char of their academia day , a Seth of pixels and colour they ’d studied closely but never saw as part of a whole homo .

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The posture of experiment on women ’s bodies and images promote women out of the diligence before they have a probability to start . In 2015 , Maddie Zug , a elder at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology , compose an op - erectile dysfunction to the Washington Post about her experience as one of a handful of female peer arrogate to use the Lena persona for a coding task . The teacher admonish them not to look up the range of a function . Of naturally , the first thing everyone in that electronic computer laboratory did was lookup for the original and pull in up the whole centerfold on their screen .

Today , female technology students still have many of the same charge as they have from the beginning : Gender wage gaps , male person - skew advancement opportunities , and sexist attitude still thrive in tech . Having to sit through a computing course where a tale about a powwow of man and their incognizant Playmate is the calendar week ’s object lesson is salt in the wound .

Though now in her 1970s and a grandmother , Lena seems to hold few hard opinions on the use of her image . Though the test image still haunt our modernistic machines , like a nostalgic nod , current range processing researchers occasionally use her in their papers . But in recent class , several journals and mental institution announced they would outright ban compliance that featured Lena , including the Optical Society , the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , and the integral family of around 150 Nature journals .

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For some in the icon processing world , Lena has simply outlasted her usefulness . In his 2018 farewell letter as editor - in - chief of IEEE Transactions , Scott Acton urge his colleagues to recall outside the old standby . The Lena crop bear around 260,000 pel — pretty good for her time . An trope from the iPhone 11 , release in 2019 , contains more than 12,000,000 .

Five years after Lena ’s Miss November proceeds , the Apple II would become the first artwork - subject personal computer to move into American house . Before image processing reached the quite a little , however , people made do with what they had : text , assemble into mosaic .

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