We are living in a world where technology is advancing at a breakneck speed. Modern-day computers are capable of carrying out highly complex computations within seconds. It would not be wrong to say that we will reach a point in the future when there wouldn't remain a single thing that computers wouldn't be able to do. But we should not fail to realise the fact that the study of computer science, in essence, eventually boils down to the way we communicate with computers to get our things done. In this article, I will walk you through some of the earliest discoveries in the field of computers.
The need to communicate over long distances led to the birth of so many communication systems. But most of them were capable of sending only predefined trivial messages. Now, for the messages to be sent across through electric cables, they had to be encoded into some form that was compatible with these electrical devices.
The earliest encrypted form of data that could be sent across through electrical cables was Morse code, developed by Samuel Finley Breese Morse in the year 1830. The invention of Morse code led to the discovery of Morse telegraphy, first used in about 1844. The Morse code makes use of dots and dashes to encode the characters. A dot is a short pulse and a dash is a long pulse, which is roughly three times that of a dot.
The possible number of characters that can be encoded depends on the number of dots and dashes being used to encode the message. One dot and one dash give us four combinations, which means we can encode four different characters using them. Two dots and two dashes give us 16 different combinations, and so on. The present-day binary encoding of data can be attributed to the Morse code. And of course, Morse code did influence the way binary digits are used to encode data. The Morse telegraphy remained a standard form of communication for a long time.
One breakthrough in the field of mathematics that laid the foundation for modern-day computing was the discovery of binary representation of numbers. In plain context, the binary representation of numbers means that we use two symbols to represent the numbers — and they happen to be 0 and 1. And it is also the simplest number system possible. There are other representations of numbers as well. The most common one is the decimal number system that makes use of ten symbols.
Even though the use of binary numbers has appeared in several ancient cultures, the actual credit of discovery goes to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Another breakthrough in the field of computation came with the discovery of Boolean Algebra by George Boole. He introduced Boolean algebra with the publication of his first book, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in the year 1847. And he improvised the concept with another publication, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought in the year 1854.
But unfortunately, George Boole failed to connect the dots. It never occurred to him that his Boolean expressions could easily be realised using trivial electronic circuits. In fact, nobody in the 19th century could connect the dots between ANDs and ORs of Boolean algebra with series and parallel connections of electronic circuits.
Then in 1938, Claude Elwood Shannon in his famous MIT master's thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, established the equivalence between Boolean algebra and electronic circuits. His work exposed the intricate relationship between Boolean algebra and electronic circuitry, and it came in handy to electrical engineers who used the tools of Boolean algebra to design circuits with switches.
In 1948, John Wilder Tukey realised that binary digits were likely to assume utmost importance in the future and wanted to come up with an alternative name to "binary digits." And he coined this beautiful word — Bit — to denote a binary digit. And the first publication to have used the word bit was Shannon's article, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Coming back, Shannon's discovery escalated the use of electronics to make computations and that eventually led to the discovery of logic gates, flip-flops, and feedback circuits — the basic building blocks of computer hardware.
During the same time, around the 1940s, an English mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing discovered a machine that could recognise a pattern and give answers to simple questions based on some preset algorithms, all in binary. This machine came to be known as the Turing Machine, and paved the way for modern-day general-purpose computers. The study of computers took pace in the mid-20th century, and computers have evolved very fast since then.
We could easily encode numbers into binary using a logarithmic function to the base 2. But we needed a way to encode character sets into binary. And ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was one of the earliest encoding schemes. It uses 7 bits to encode 128 specified characters. The encoding schemes have undergone a tremendous change in recent times to include characters from various languages — and that led to the birth of Unicode. With the help of Unicode, we can encode all the existing characters into binary.
Everything that has got to do with computers is in binary form. All forms of data — be it multimedia, text, or anything — everything is stored in binary form. All computations happen in binary.
Can you imagine a human society without a common communicating language? It's impossible, right? And the binary digits, or the bits as we call them, are the only syllables in the computer's language. It understands only these two syllables. Everything other than these does not mean anything to it. Bits are so fundamental to a computer. They are the smallest building blocks of information. The only thing that remained constant throughout the evolution of computers is the use of bits — and they will remain as long as computers remain. And that justifies my title.
Vera Nazarian's quote echoes in my mind as I write this article, and I feel it finds relevance here. She says:
"Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs and stories. One letter falls and the entire language falters."
So are bits.