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Digitizing
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11331 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
3,328 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
The time is Elizabethan England, the late sixteenth century. Francis Bacon, the statesman, philosopher, essayist, and confidential advisor to Queen Elizabeth's court, is determined to develop a more secure secret code to frustrate his enemies in court and diplomatic intrigues.
Nothing could seem more irrelevant today than Bacon's success or failure; but his success in applying a unique new coding technology four hundred years ago has sparked a modern technological revolution that is quietly sweeping through society.
The soldiers of the revolution are two numbers, the humble 0 and the lowly 1. It has finally occurred because of the availability of powerful but inexpensive computer circuitry; and although it is transforming work, leisure, health care, automobiles telephones, household appliances, and virtually every other aspect of life, most people probably could not name it.
It is the digital revolution. Digitization. Digital data conversion. Digitech.
No matter what the term, it is the technology that inaugurated the computer age by making it possible to encode, store, and transmit huge amounts of date with microelectronic devices. And it is the technology that now is leading the computer into a new era of applications, which promise to pervade the entire fabric of society.
Digitization is the process of encoding date, words, photographs, television images, speech, music, and other information in the binary language of the computer. Once in this language, which consists of 0s and 1s, the information can be manipulated by computer programs in an almost infinite variety of ways.
The technology for digitizing images alone has opened new vistas of human sight, giving mankind clearer and more perceptive views of everything from organs deep within the human body to planets and moons in the remote reaches of the solar system medical diagnostic images taken with computerized X-ray, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance scanners are products of the digitech revolution. (See in this issue, "Medical Diagnostic Imaging," pages 241-247.) So are the images produced by military reconnaissance satellites in which digital conversion transforms fuzzy blurs into distinct shapes of missile silos or submarine berths. The digital television sets now appearing on the market are another offspring of the digitech revolution. So is the music, of almost
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