At Kodak in the 1970's, my father devised the "Bayer filter" used in digital cameras. At the time, he wrote a research system for image processing in sed.
Kodak's goal was to keep customers happy while selling less silver. Less silver means more grain, so they envisioned digital methods for reducing grain, before printing photographs at some centralized facility (obviously not the pocket I keep my phone in). So the sed program did various convolutions on rather coarse images, for playing with ideas.
My dad's other contribution that stuck was ordered dithering: Bit patterns for various gray levels that worked well next to each other, without edge artifacts at the transitions. Long ago replaced by other methods for higher resolutions, but last seen as part of the DEC logo on their product boxes.
I'm sure that choosing characters to represent gray levels in this sed program got him thinking in that direction. I've never been good at complicated, but he taught me to see simple.