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From Dots to Bits

Posted byJonathan Sterne March 3, 2011March 3, 2011

A little mp3 book tidbit. Thanks to Tricia Soto, CASBS librarian, I finally got my hands on a dusty 1911 text I’ve been after (I originally found this pic on Wikipedia, but it’s now gone and the text that goes with it turns out to be priceless).

/></p> <p>From the Cyclopedia of Applied Electricity, 1911:</p> <p>“the entire scheme of the Morse Code, with its dots, spaces and dashes, their combinations and their relative time values computed according to the unit of time–the dot–and the letters, figures and characters they represent, is shown graphically in the accompanying chart.”</p> <p>There would be a series of conceptual steps from <em>the dot</em> as a fundamental unit of time in telegraphy to <em>the bit</em> as a fundamental unit of communication in Claude Shannon’s <em>Mathematical Theory of Communication</em>, but the path was already taking shape in the 1910s. Already, communication was understood in terms of a binary on/off operation. What was true for telegraphy in this diagram would, 40 years later, be taken as true for that quintessential 20th century entity, “information.”</p> </div><!-- .entry-content --> <footer class= Posted byJonathan SterneMarch 3, 2011March 3, 2011Posted inAcademe, Ideas

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