Free Wallpapers Definition
Source (google.com.pk)wallpaper was used in Europe in the 16th and 17th cent. as an inexpensive substitute for costly hangings. The French developed marbled papers, introduced from the East via Italy and used at first for box coverings, into larger sheets for wall coverings and also made other papers in small designs. Outlines were block-printed, and the color was filled in with brush or stencil. The flock technique of printing designs with an adhesive and sprinkling with fine bits of wool or silk was probably first adapted to wallpaper c.1620 in France, but by the 18th cent. England had become the principal manufacturer. Sets of painted Chinese paper were imported in the 17th cent. and by the 18th had become highly popular and were widely imitated. In France, Jean Papillon established in 1688 the first large wallpaper factory, where he made matching designs that would be continuous when pasted. In the 18th cent. paper was glued into continuous rolls before printing. Wallpaper was manufactured in the American colonies from the mid-18th cent. Colonial homes displayed various scenic and pictorial papers, often with tropical themes. The mid-19th cent. brought modern printing on roll paper, mass production, and decadence in design. The English Pre-Raphaelite artists, particularly William Morris, promoted a renaissance in wallpaper designs, and the 20th cent. has seen its fulfillment in England, France, and the United States. American designers have revived interest in landscape papers and have greatly developed frieze and panel papers through the medium of hand block printing.Wallpaper (also desktop picture and desktop background) is an image used as a background of a graphical user interface on a computer screen or mobile communications device. On a computer it is usually for the desktop, while for a mobile phone it is usually the background for the 'home' or 'idle' screen. Though most devices comes with a default picture, users can usually change it to files of their choosing.
"Wallpaper" is the term used in Microsoft Windows before Windows Vista (where it is called the Desktop "Background"), while Mac OS X calls it a "desktop picture" (previously, the term desktop pattern was used to refer to a small pattern that was repeated to fill the screen).The X Window System was one of the earliest systems to include support for an arbitrary image as wallpaper via the xsetroot program, which at least as early as the X10R3 release in 1985 could tile the screen with any solid color or any binary-image X BitMap file.In 1989, a free software program called xgifroot was released that allowed an arbitrary color GIF image to be used as wallpaper,and in the same year the free xloadimage program was released which could display a variety of image formats (including color images in Sun Rasterfile format) as the desktop background.Subsequently a number of programs were released that added wallpaper support for additional image formats and other features, such as the xpmroot program (released in 1993 as part of fvwm) and the xv software (released in 1994).
The original Macintosh operating system only allowed a selection of 8×8-pixel binary-image tiled patterns; the ability to use small color patterns was added in System 5 in 1987. MacOS 8 in 1997 was the first Macintosh version to include built-in support for using arbitrary images as desktop pictures, rather than small repeating patterns.
Windows 3.0 in 1990 was the first version of Microsoft Windows to come with support for wallpaper customization, and used the term "wallpaper" for this feature.[8] Although Windows 3.0 only came with 7 small patterns (2 black-and-white and 5 16-color), the user could supply other images in the BMP file format with up to 8-bit color (although the system was theoretically capable of handling 24-bit color images, it did so by dithering them to an 8-bit palette). In the same year, third-party freeware was available for the Macintosh and OS/2 to provide similar wallpaper features otherwise lacking in those systems. A wallpaper feature was added in a beta release of OS/2 2.0 in 1991.