The Early Digital Communication

ITU-T has promulgated a number of standards for digital transmission, starting from the foundational standard for digital representation of telephone speech at 64 kbit/s. This is actually a two-edged cornerstone because the standard specifies two different methods to digitise speech: A-law and µ-law. Both use the same sampling frequency (8…

Speech digitisation was driven by the need to manage long-distance transmission systems more effectively. But the result of this drive also affected end users because, thanks to digital technologies, the random level of speech quality that had plagued telephony since its early days began to have less consequences on communication.…

Since olden times, humans have invented practical mnemonic rules to speed up calculations on numbers – and ensuring that the results are correct. These were of varying complexity depending on the system used to represent numbers: very complex with Roman numbers and rather straightforward with Arabic numbers, but they all…

Because the computer industry was “born” digital, it was the first to be confronted with the problem of “mapping” digital data onto analogue carriers, i.e. storing bits on intrinsically analogue devices. One of the first solutions – storage of bits on paper tape – was limited to small quantities of…

Since the early times of computing, it became apparent that CPUs should be designed to handle chunks of bits called “bytes” instead of or in addition to individual bits, obviously without altering the status of bits as the atomic components of information. After some odd initial choices (like the 6…

During my previous incarnation as a researcher in the video coding field, I made more than one attempt at unification. But do not expect lofty thoughts of global convergence of businesses. At that time my intention was just to achieve common coding architectures that could suit the needs of different…