The creative process includes the abstraction, encoding, automation,, and networking phases. First, information, or data, must be abstracted. Pioneers of the digital world realized natural objects, or concepts could be represented using symbols or numbers. An example being Samuel Morse reducing English characters and numbers to dots and dashes. Alan Turing also reduced computation to symbolic steps and asked whether computers and humans can be indistinguishable.
Encoding comes in the form of Morse code, ASCII, Unicode, samples of sound waves, and pixels for images. For this encoded information, machines must be created that can manipulate it faster than humans such as transistors and microprocessors.
Leading to the last step of the creative process, networking. Once the prior pieces are laid out, the digital world can become connected through telegraph lines, telephone networks, and the internet.
The social environment leading up to the digital world we currently live in was made up of visionaries who saw a grand future.
They wished to welcome forth a new era that did not have to rely on analog with its inability to correct or get rid of noise.
Society needed a new because the rise of industrialization, railroads, telegraphs, and more, meant a rise in data that humans could no longer manage themselves manually. In the same vein, analog communication and paper ledgers could not keep up with global commerce.
Global commerce that boomed after the wars; the wars themselves were digital breakthroughs. There was military urgency behind gaining codebreaking, finding a way to securely communicate, how to track missiles, and early networking. Hence why the government funded Morse’s version of the telegraph.
The general population also wanted to add more convenience in their lives in the form of instant communication, portable music, and online shopping among other things.
There are countless visionaries who paved the journey to the digital world we live in today and the ones mentioned in this post are only a few.
Samuel Morse was able to create a digital encoding of language which gave his telegraph system an advantage over competing versions.
Leonard Gale and Alfred Vale were crucial partners to Morse; they helped transform Morse’s prototype into a long-distance and functional system; with Vale expanding Morse’s code to include letters and character, not just numbers.
Ada Lovelace is considered a visionary in computing because she wrote the very first computer program. She was the first to recognize the potential behind Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, that it was a machine that could do much more than pure calculations.
A man who is regularly regarded as the father of computer science, Alan Turing. He helped create the Bombe codebreaking machine that was used to crack German Enigma codes, the theoretical Turing machine and Turing test. As well as designing one of the first designs for digital computer.
The Turing machine is a theoretical mathematical model that defines the logical principles of a computer. That is, it can perform any calculation as long as it is given an algorithm.
The Turing test formed the basis of AI development. It was a criteria meant to establish if a computer (AI) can be indistinguishable from a human.
John von Neumann designed the von Neumann architecture which is stored-program design for almost all modern computers.
In the race of creating a telegraph, William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet in 1825.
Joseph Marie Jacquard was able to build on the work of those who came before him and created the digital loom. It was able to weave any pattern without a pause in production. It achieved this through punch cards that held the essence of the design.
The shift from telegraph to telephone was solidified by Alexander Graham Bell who received a patent for the telephone in 1876.
These are only a few of the many that revolutionized our modern world and ushered in the digital era we live in.