The Digital Revolution, also sometimes called the third industrial revolution,is the change from analog mechanical and electronictechnology to digital technology that has taken place since about 1980 and continues to the present day. Implicitly, the term also refers to the sweeping changes brought about by digital computing and communication technology during the latter half of the 20th century. Analogous to theAgricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution marked the beginning of the Information Age.
Central to this revolution is the mass production and widespread use of digital logic circuits, and its derived technologies, including the computer, digital cellular phone, and fax machine.
The trends of technological revolutions
The Agricultural Revolution lead to agricultural cities in the ancient world in the MiddleEast, Mesoamerica, China, the Indus Valley, Southern Europe and South America.
The Middle East is a region that roughly encompasses a majority of Western Asia (excluding the Caucasus) and Egypt.
Mesoamerica is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador,Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries
Then the Industrial Revolution lead to industrial cities in the 19th century such as Manchester, Newcastle Upon Tyne and New York City. The Industrial Revolution and Digital Revolution are now taking place concurrently in China and India as people leave the rural areas for industrial and high tech cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Bombay.
In the 20th century the rise of the service economy caused people to leave the industrial cities and move out into the suburbs.
Rise in digital tech use, 1980–2010
1980
Cell phone subscribers: 11.2 million
Internet users: All Internet users at this time were indexed in a phone book sized directory
1990
Cell phone subscribers: 12.4 million (0.25% of world population in 1990)
Internet users: 2.8 million (0.05% of world population in 1990)
2002
Cell phone subscribers: 1,174 million (19% of world population in 2002)
Internet users: 631 million (11% of world population in 2002)
2010
Cell phone subscribers: 4,000 million (67% of world population in 2010)
Internet users: 1,800 million (26.6% of world population in 2010)
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 Bell 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.
Timeline
Origins (1947–1979)
In 1947 the transistor was invented, leading the way to more advanced digital computers. In the 1950s and 1960s the military, governments and other organizations had computer systems.
The public was first introduced to the concepts that would lead to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I,CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols forinternetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.
The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s led to the inspiration and eventual creation of the World Wide Web.
The first personal computers came out in the 1970s and time-sharing computers were commonplace in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The 1980s
In the 1980s computers became familiar machines to the general public in developed countries, and millions of people bought computers for home use including 17 million Commodore 64s alone between 1982 and 1994.
By the late 1980s many businesses became dependent on computers and digital technology to operate.
Motorola created the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTac in 1983. However, this device used analog communication - digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991 when the 2Gnetwork started to be opened in Finland to accommodate the unexpected demand for cell phones that was becoming apparent in the late 1980s.
The first true digital camera was created in 1988, and the first were marketed in December of 1989 in Japan and in 1990 in the United States. By the mid-2000s, they would eclipse traditional film in popularity.
Digital ink was also invented in the late 1980s. Disney's CAPS system (created 1988) was used for a scene in 1989's The Little Mermaid and for all their animation films between 1990's The Rescuers Down Under and 2004's Home On The Range.
The 1990s
Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web, first brainstorming the general concept in March 1989 and writing the code and server in the last months of 1990. The first public digital HDTVbroadcast was of the 1990 World Cup that June; it was played in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy. However HDTV did not become a standard until the mid-2000s outside of Japan.
In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public. By 1996, the Internet was in the mainstream consciousness and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999, almost every country had a connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, most connections were slow dial-up and the present day mass Internet culture was not possible.
In the late 1980s, about 15% of households in the United States owned computers, by 2000, this was up to 51%.
The 2000s
Cell phones became as ubiquitous as computers by the early 2000s, with movie theaters beginning to show ads telling people to silence their phones. They also became much more advancedthan phones of the 1990s, most of which only took calls or at most allowed for the playing of simple games.
Text messaging existed in the 1990s but was not widely used until the early 2000s, when it became a cultural phenomenon.
The digital revolution became truly global in this time as well - after revolutionizing society in the developed world in the 1990s, the digital revolution spread to the masses in the developing world in the 2000s.
In late 2005 the population of the Internet reached 1 billion,[16] and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. HDTV became the standard television broadcasting format in many countries by the end of the decade.
The 2010s
The link between mobile devices and internet websites via "social networking" have become a standard in digital communication. By 2012, over 2 billion people used the Internet, twice the number using it in 2007. Cloud computing had entered the mainstream by the early 2010s. By 2015, tablet computers and smartphones are expected to exceed personal computers in Internet usage.
Technological basis
Underlying the digital revolution was the development of the digital electronic computer, the personal computer, and particularly the microprocessor with its steadily increasing performance (as described by Moore's law), which enabled computer technology to be embedded into a huge range of objects from cameras to personal music players. Equally important was the development of transmission technologies including computer networking, the Internet and digital broadcasting. 3G phones, whose social penetration grew exponentially in the 2000s, also played a very large role in the digital revolution as they simultaneously provide ubiquitous entertainment, communications, and online connectivity
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory".
Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with a landmark paper that he published in 1948. However, he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of all time Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his basic work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.
Boolean theory and beyond
In 1932, Shannon entered the University of Michigan, where he took a course that introduced him to the work of George Boole. He graduated in 1936 with two bachelor's degrees, one in electrical engineering and one in mathematics. He soon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an early analog computer.
While studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of the differential analyzer, Shannon saw that Boole's concepts could be used to great utility. A paper drawn from his 1937 master's degree thesis,A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, was published in the 1938 issue of the Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. It also earned Shannon the Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award in 1940. Howard Gardner called Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."
Victor Shestakov of the Moscow State University, had proposed a theory of systems of electrical switches based on Boolean logic earlier than Shannon in 1935, but the first publication of Shestakov's result was in 1941, after the publication of Shannon's thesis in America.
In this work, Shannon proved that boolean algebra and binary arithmetic could be used to simplify the arrangement of the electromechanical relays that were used then in telephone call routing switches. He next expanded this concept, and he also proved that it would be possible to use arrangements of relays to solve problems in Boolean algebra.
Using this property of electrical switches to do logic is the basic concept that underlies all electronic digital computers. Shannon's work became the foundation of practical digital circuit designwhen it became widely known in the electrical engineering community during and after World War II. The theoretical rigor of Shannon's work completely replaced the ad hoc methods that had previously prevailed.
Vannevar Bush suggested that Shannon, flush with this success, work on his dissertation at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, funded by the Carnegie Institution, headed by Bush, to develop similar mathematical relationships for Mendelian genetics. This research resulted in Shannon's doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) thesis at MIT in 1940, called An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.
In 1940, Shannon became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In Princeton, Shannon had the opportunity to discuss his ideas with influential scientists and mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann, and he even had an occasional encounter with Albert Einstein or Kurt Gödel. Shannon worked freely across disciplines, and began to shape the ideas that would become Information Theory.
Inventions
Shannon then joined Bell Labs to work on fire-control systems and cryptography during World War II, under a contract with section D-2 (Control Systems section) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC).
Shannon met his wife Betty when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs. They were married in 1949.
For two months early in 1943, Shannon came into contact with the leading British cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing. Turing had been posted to Washington to share with the U.S. Navy's cryptanalytic service the methods used by the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to break the ciphers used by the Kriegsmarine U-boats in the North Atlantic Ocean. He was also interested in the encipherment of speech and to this end spent time at Bell Labs. Shannon and Turing met at teatime in the cafeteria.] Turing showed Shannon his paper that defined what is now known as the "Universal Turing machine" in 1936. which impressed him, as many of its ideas were complementary to his own.
In 1945, as the war was coming to an end, the NDRC was issuing a summary of technical reports as a last step prior to its eventual closing down. Inside the volume on fire control a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems, coauthored by Shannon, Ralph Beebe Blackman, and Hendrik Wade Bode, formally treated the problem of smoothing the data in fire-control by analogy with "the problem of separating a signal from interfering noise in communications systems." In other words it modeled the problem in terms of data and signal processing and thus heralded the coming of the Information Age.
Shannon's work on cryptography was even more closely related to his later publications on communication theory. At the close of the war, he prepared a classified memorandum for Bell Telephone Labs entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography," dated September 1945. A declassified version of this paper was published in 1949 as "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in the Bell System Technical Journal. This paper incorporated many of the concepts and mathematical formulations that also appeared in his A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon said that his wartime insights into communication theory and cryptography developed simultaneously and that "they were so close together you couldn’t separate them". In a footnote near the beginning of the classified report, Shannon announced his intention to "develop these results ... in a forthcoming memorandum on the transmission of information." ]
While he was at Bell Labs, Shannon proved that the cryptographic one-time pad is unbreakable in his classified research that was later published in October 1949. He also proved that any unbreakable system must have essentially the same characteristics as the one-time pad: the key must be truly random, as large as the plain text, never reused in whole or part, and be kept secret.
Later on in the American Venona project, a supposed "one-time pad" system by the Soviets was partially broken by the National Security Agency, but this was because of misuses of the one-time pads by Soviet cryptographic technicians in the United States and Canada. The Soviet technicians made the mistake of using the same pads more than once sometimes, and this was noticed by American cryptanalysts.
In 1948 the promised memorandum appeared as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", an article in two parts in the July and October issues of the Bell System Technical Journal. This work focuses on the problem of how best to encode the information a sender wants to transmit. In this fundamental work he used tools in probability theory, developed by Norbert Wiener, which were in their nascent stages of being applied to communication theory at that time. Shannon developed information entropy as a measure for the uncertainty in a message while essentially inventing the field of information theory.
The book, co-authored with Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, reprints Shannon's 1948 article and Weaver's popularization of it, which is accessible to the non-specialist. Warren Weaver pointed out that, the word information in communication theory is not related to what you do say, but to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. Shannon's concepts were also popularized, subject to his own proofreading, in John Robinson Pierce's Symbols, Signals, and Noise.
Information theory's fundamental contribution to natural language processing and computational linguistics was further established in 1951, in his article "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English", showing upper and lower bounds of entropy on the statistics of English - giving a statistical foundation to language analysis. In addition, he proved that treating whitespace as the 27th letter of the alphabet actually lowers uncertainty in written language, providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition.
Another notable paper published in 1949 is "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", a declassified version of his wartime work on the mathematical theory of cryptography, in which he proved that all theoretically unbreakable ciphers must have the same requirements as the one-time pad. He is also credited with the introduction of sampling theory, which is concerned with representing a continuous-time signal from a (uniform) discrete set of samples. This theory was essential in enabling telecommunications to move from analog to digital transmissions systems in the 1960s and later.
He returned to MIT to hold an endowed chair in 1956.
Hobbies
Outside of his academic pursuits, Shannon was interested in juggling, unicycling, and chess. He also invented many devices, including rocket-powered flying discs, a motorized pogo stick, and a flame-throwing trumpet for a science exhibition. One of his more humorous devices was a box kept on his desk called the "Ultimate Machine", based on an idea by Marvin Minsky. Otherwise featureless, the box possessed a single switch on its side. When the switch was flipped, the lid of the box opened and a mechanical hand reached out, flipped off the switch, then retracted back inside the box. Renewed interest in the "Ultimate Machine" has emerged on YouTube and Thingiverse. In addition he built a device that could solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.
He is also considered the co-inventor of the first wearable computer along with Edward O. Thorp. The device was used to improve the odds when playing roulette.
Legacy and tributes
Shannon came to MIT in 1956 to join its faculty and to conduct work in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He continued to serve on the MIT faculty until 1978. To commemorate his achievements, there were celebrations of his work in 2001, and there are currently six statues of Shannon sculpted by Eugene L. Daub: one at the University of Michigan; one at MIT in theLaboratory for Information and Decision Systems; one in Gaylord, Michigan; one at the University of California at San Diego; one at Bell Labs; and another at AT&T Shannon Labs. After thebreakup of the Bell system, the part of Bell Labs that remained with AT&T Corporation was named Shannon Labs in his honor.
According to Neil Sloane, an AT&T Fellow who co-edited Shannon's large collection of papers in 1993, the perspective introduced by Shannon's communication theory (now called information theory) is the foundation of the digital revolution, and every device containing a microprocessor or microcontroller is a conceptual descendant of Shannon's publication in 1948: "He's one of the great men of the century. Without him, none of the things we know today would exist. The whole digital revolution started with him."
Shannon developed Alzheimer's disease, and he spent his last few years in a nursing home in Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Moore Shannon, his son, Andrew Moore Shannon, his daughter, Margarita Shannon, his sister, Catherine Shannon Kay, and his two granddaughters.
Shannon was reportedly oblivious to many of the marvels of the digital revolution because his mind had been so ravaged by Alzheimer's disease. His wife mentioned in his obituary that had it not been for Alzheimer's disease, "He would have been bemused" by it all.
Biography
| Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) | |
| Born | April 30, 1916 Petoskey, Michigan |
|---|---|
| Died | February 24, 2001 (aged 84) Medford, Massachusetts |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics and electronic engineering |
| Institutions | Bell Laboratories Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank Lauren Hitchcock |
| Doctoral students | Danny Hillis Ivan Sutherland Bert Sutherland Heinrich Arnold Ernst |
| Known for | |
| Notable awards | IEEE Medal of Honor (1966) National Medal of Science(1966) Harvey Prize (1972) Kyoto Prize (1985) National Inventors Hall of Fame(2004) |
Shannon was born in Petoskey, Michigan. His father, Claude, Sr. (1862 – 1934), a descendant of early settlers of New Jersey, was a self-made businessman, and for a while, a Judge of Probate. Shannon's mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1890 – 1945), was a language teacher, and for a number of years she was the principal of Gaylord High School. Most of the first 16 years of Shannon's life were spent in Gaylord, Michigan, where he attended public school, graduating from Gaylord High School in 1932. Shannon showed an inclination towards mechanical and electrical things. His best subjects were science and mathematics, and at home he constructed such devices as models of planes, a radio-controlled model boat and a wirelesstelegraph system to a friend's house a half-mile away. While growing up, he also worked as a messenger for the Western Union company.
His childhood hero was Thomas Edison, whom he later learned was a distant cousin. Both were descendants of John Ogde, a colonial leader and an ancestor of many distinguished people.
On his political and religious views, Shannon was apolitical and an atheist.
\\
No comments:
Post a Comment