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A display on your screen consists of points of light laid out in a two-dimensional array. Each point is called a pixel—an abbreviation derived from the words picture element.
A typical screen has on the order of a million pixels. Black-and-white screens need just 1 bit of memory per pixel to remember whether that pixel is bright or dark. By devoting 1 byte to each pixel, color screens can display any of $2^8=256$ colors.