The History of Digital Technology: How it All Began and Where it is Going

As the term suggests, digital refers to numbers, two in particular, namely ones and zeros. In the mid-1950s, we already had the technology to send messages along telephone lines in an analogue fashion. At that time, American engineers were seriously looking into the 17th-century concept of using binary numbers to represent information. They chose 0 and 1, which can be added to infinitely, (00110001000101000), and their goal was to transmit this data along fibre optic lines; each digit is called 1 bit, and by joining many ones and zeros, it was possible to send large blocks of data, which might be text, audio or even video.