History
The most famous early systematic use of error detection was by Jewish scribes in the precise copying of the Jewish bible, beginning before Christ. An emphasis on minute details of words and spellings evolved into the idea of a perfect text in 135 CE, and with it increasingly forceful strictures that a deviation in even a single letter would make a Torah scroll invalid. The scribes used methods such as summing the number of words per line and per page (Numerical Masorah), and checking the middle paragraph, word and letter against the original. The page was thrown out if a single mistake was found, and three mistakes on a single page would result in the entire manuscript being destroyed (the equivalent of retransmission on a telecommunications channel). The effectiveness of their methods was verified by the accuracy of copying through the centuries demonstrated by discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-1956, dating from c.150 BCE-75 CE.
Read more about this topic: Error Detection And Correction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)