History of Digital Communication

Digitized devices have been around for ages. Albeit that current digital devices are electronic and deal with binary electron digital transmissions, they are not by far the first ‘digitized devices’ to have come around. Currently when we refer to digital communication devices we are referring to those that utilize a data technology that utilizes discrete values or a digital language. Society currently heavily relies on such digital equipment like cell phones, desk computers, laptops, digital cameras, televisions, DVD players, blue ray players, gaming systems, and digital music players. All of these devices can be used in conjunction with one another and communicate to one another seamlessly.

Historical Digital Communication devices

These digital devices of old were in no way electronic, but the basic computing system utilized within, classifies them as historical digital devices.

Historical texts, books written long ago utilized a very limited set of characters and heavily incorporated the use of symbols; the beacon used to signal to ships; smoke signals where a blanket or other form of controlling or transmitting puffs of smoke as a means of relaying certain information. The abacus is another device that is considered to be digital in nature due to the arrangement of the beads and the way they represented numbers within computing calculations. The Braille system actually introduced binary formatting for encoding various characters, another characteristic of a digital device. Morse code too was a digital device. The interspersed use of the dot, dash, short gap, long gap via tapping or light flashing to communicate specific language closely represents the signals used with today’s electronic devices that allows them to communicate.

The basis for all of these historical digital devices was the use of a particular code or signal to communicate, and were the early signs of what digital communication was to represent in modern society.