Russell Kirsch, computer scientist who scanned the first digital image, dies at 91

Russell Kirsch was a 27-year-old computer scientist and, not incidentally, a new father when he did one day in early 1957 what many parents do and brought a photograph of his baby to the office.

His office was the National Bureau of Standards — now the National Institute of Standards and Technology — where Mr. Kirsch was one of the few people authorized to work on the Standards Electronic Automatic Computer, or SEAC, the first programmable computer in the United States.