Digital Revolution - Brief History

Brief History

The underlying technology was invented in the later half of the 19th century and became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer. Claude Shannon, a Ball Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1123 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The digital revolution converted technology that previously was analog into a digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to the original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely.

A major landmark in the revolution was the transition from analog to digital recorded music. In the 1980s, the digital format of optical compact discs supplanted analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes, as the popular medium of choice.