The Science of Computing - A Concise and Practical Introduction to Programming Algorithms in Java - page 219

10
The Science of Computing
10.1 The digital world
During the last three decades (1978-2008), we have witnessed worldwide an
unprecedented revolution: the venue of the digital world . Nowadays there is no
doubt that digital music players or digital cameras have replaced their analog
counterparts forever (or at least until the next paradigm shift). But what are
the benefits of this analog-to-digital wave since the industry is still working
hard to reach the recording/rendering qualities of some prior analog devices.
The first merit of the digital world is to dissociate contents from its support.
Once digitized contents are all binary strings of zeros and ones, this “binariza-
tion” process harmonizes all former kinds of contents (books, musics, pictures
an videos) into a universal representation : strings of bits.
The second merit of this digital revolution is that there is a universal player:
the “computer.” Indeed, although there are a lot of dedicated devices in the
consumer electronic industry optimized for reading such or such a kind of
digital content, a “computer” can read/interpret and render appropriately all
these digitized contents. That is, the computer became the universal device .
Figure 10.1 illustrates this wave of universal content/universal players.
This raises the unsolved question of defining what information is. A key
advantage of binarizing all contents is that we have at our disposal generic
algorithms for handling these binary strings that can be used whatever the
type of contents. Namely, we can indifferently: