Today is Tell a Great Story Day. It's also Samuel Morse's birthday. So here follows a great story, in Morse Code.
Got that, you Morse coders out there? For those of you who don't speak the language, that series of dots and dashes translates to "Morse invented the Internet."
Before you get all bent out of shape about the other Internet pioneers who have a better claim to being father of the Internet (y'know, people like Vannevar Bush, George Licklider, Al Gore, or the Webmeister himself, Tim Berners-Lee), consider the following:
Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was, among other things, the inventor of the single-wire telegraph system. This network facilitated near-instantaneous communication across vast distances, using a medium of communication that had only two components: An on signal and an off signal. It was the original digital communication network. Today, using only on and off signals, the Internet transfers digital data across more robust networks and at vastly faster speeds, but using the same zeroes and ones Morse had to play with.
Only later did analog telecommunications come along--in the form of voice telephony and then radio and television broadcasts. But that little revolution is fast becoming an aberration. Most phone calls--including all cell phone calls--convert voice data into digital packets that are only converted later into analog sounds. Television will soon be going digital too. Only radio is a pure frequency-modulated analog form now.
So from here in dot-dash-dot-com land, we wish Samuel a very happy 218th birthday. Many happy ACKs of the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment