For more than fifty years, computer engineers have sought to construct minimal computers using only a single instruction computer. While it might appear to be a simple academic exercise, remarkably, a rich computation paradigm can be developed using this approach, with important applications and implications in reconfigurable, chemical, optical and biological computing. More recently, the widespread use of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has made such an approach not only desirable, but also practical. In this paper the history and motivation behind single instruction or one instruction computing (OISC) is reviewed. It is then shown how the paradigm can be used to implement a variety of imaging operations efficiently. Finally, a practical application and future work in languages and tools are presented.