Searching for the origins of the 'digital world'

JAKARTA (JP): Remember the old days when your Mom or Dad -- or maybe your Grandma or Grandad -- had to crank the telephone repeatedly before the operator in the central office picked up her receiver and asked which number he/she wished to call?

That was way before the digital era arrived. Today, most of the telephone networks in the world are still analog, but the communications are digitized using a technique called Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) as they travel along the inter-city and inter- continent trunks.

And do you still play those vinyl records of Connie Francis and Pat Boone? These are not digital recordings. They are analog recordings. When these beautiful recordings were transferred into compact discs, they became "digitized".

In the analog world, the voltage of the electrical current that carried your Mom's or Dad's, your Grandpa's or Grandma's, Connie's or Pat's voice from the microphone to the operator's earpiece or your hi-fi's speakers simply varied according to the frequencies and the amplitudes of the sounds.

In the digital world, these sounds are captured and converted into the digital form using a process generally called "sampling". Suffice to say that the sound waves are translated into a series of ones and zeros (1s and 0s). The first advantage is that transferring and storing information is easier, faster and cheaper in the digital form. To give you an idea, just compare the compact disc and the phonograph records. The smaller disc can easily contain the music from two of the larger records.

Another advantage is that the quality of the copy is just the same as the original. You can copy music from a cassette to another cassette repeatedly, but chances are you will get lower and lower quality over time. On the other hand, you can duplicate Luiz Bonfa's CD a hundred times using the copy of a copy and the sonic quality will remain the same.

Today, information is increasingly captured and encoded in the digital format rather than in the analog format. Digital cameras are everywhere. Voice recorders from Samsung, Sony and others capture and stores digital audio files, not analog audio recordings. Video cameras store images in digital format, not analog. Even the greeting cards you are receiving this year are digital rather than paper-based.

People have gone as far as using digital cash -- and digital coins -- to make purchases on the Internet. You can visit www.ecash.com if you wish to have a real taste of the "Digital Economy". When you send a formal letter through the Net, you will be asked to add your digital signature on it. Digital radio programs are now broadcast from the satellites, and using the special radio receivers with antennas you can listen to CD- quality music anywhere in the world as long as you are still inside the satellite's footprint.

Life in the digital era is obviously different from the life in the days of analog. We are depending more and more heavily on digitally controlled devices -- or computers in various forms and sizes -- from communication to life support. At any rate, the word "digital" means more than merely displaying digits, as in the calculator-looking digital watch that was so fashionable during the early 1970s. It is an entirely different way of doing things.

Different in what way? In the digital world, geographic distance has become so irrelevant. Everything has become instant, and thus the pace of life has accelerated tremendously. Whether digital life is better or worse than the old analog life, you tell me. (Zatni Arbi)