How We've Become Digital

By Chris Taylor and Unmesh Kher

It's been like a wild ride on a runaway train. Ten dizzying decades that revolutionized business, communications, entertainment and the way we live.

Just how we got here so fast--from Marconi's first tentative radio transmission to live photos of Mars broadcast over the Internet--is a story experts are still struggling to make sense of. In hindsight, what appears to have happened is that several diverse forms of communications and information processing, each following its own technological track, emerged from stuttering starts, built up speed and then converged suddenly into a kind of Grand Central Terminal known as the World Wide Web.

Along the way, vital components began to shrink: the vacuum tube became the transistor; the transistor led to the microchip; the microchip married the phone and gave birth to the modem. Soon enough, sounds, photos, movies and conversations would be ground down into the smallest components of all: 1s and 0s. Was the digital revolution inevitable? In our brave new wired world, it certainly seems that way.

--By Chris Taylor and Unmesh Kher

TELEVISION

THE DAWN OF TV

1922: Philo Farnsworth describes electronic television

1923: Vladimir Zworykin patents design for iconoscope, a television transmission tube

1925: Using a mechanical system, John Logie Baird transmits first still picture

1927: Farnsworth creates first all-electronic television system

In 1927 Bell Labs makes the first live cable-TV transmission

1928: Baird constructs first mechanical color television

RCA broadcasts from 1939 World's Fair

NBC broadcasts the first TV commercial in 1941

1948 First cable TVs appear in rural areas of U.S.

Golden Age of Television

1951 CBS makes first color broadcast

1953 Standard color-TV system introduced in U.S.

1960 Transistors first used in televisions

1969 First commercially viable VCR sold by Sony

1978 First digitally coded laser videodiscs appear on the market

1988 Japan conducts world's first large scale analog-TV broadcast from the Seoul Olympics

RADIO

1901 Italy's Guglielmo Marconi conducts first transatlantic radio transmission

VACUUM TUBE Developed by Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1904

1906 Lee De Forest modifies Fleming's vacuum tube to create Audion valve

1912 De Forest reworks his Audion valves into powerful amplifiers

1918 Edwin Armstrong develops superheterodyne circuit, the receiver-amplifier at the heart of radios and televisions today

Golden Age of Radio

1933 Armstrong develops FM (frequency modulation) radio broadcasting

1954 First transistor radio

1961 First stereo radio broadcast

1970 First transmission of data into a computer network by radio waves

1986 European radio stations use the FM carrier wave to transmit data

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

1917 As the U.S. enters World War I, 1 of every 10 Americans has a telephone

1927 Bell Labs invents the negative feedback amplifier, significantly improving telecom quality

1929 AT&T patents coaxial cable

DIGITAL SIGNALS Alec Reeves develops pulse-code modulation system in 1939 for converting analog information into digital style on-and-off signals

1945 Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke proposes geostationary satellites to aid communications

TRANSISTOR William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen invent the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947

The laser in invented at Bell Labs in 1958

1960 AT&T introduces Touch-Tone dialing

1962 Launch of the first communications satellite, Telstar

Ericsson introduces its first cellular phone in 1979

1979 CompuServe launches its online service launches

1988 PanAmSat launches the first privately owned communications satellite

COMPUTING

After Herman Hollerith designs his punch-card tabulating machine for the 1890 U.S. Census and founds the company that will become IBM, the idea of computers slowly gathers steam

1919 Hugo Koch patents a "secret writing machine," later known as the Enigma, a mechanical, cryptography device used by Germany during World War II

Birth of Computers

1932 M.I.T.'s Vannevar Bush builds Differential Analyzer, a mechanical computer

1936 Britain's Alan Turing publishes description of a universal computing machine

1939 First computer that uses vacuum tubes built by John Atanasoff

1943 Turing and other Enigma-code crackers at Bletchley Park build Colossus

1945 John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert build ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer

In 1949 Claude Shannon shows that all information can be reduced to 1's and 0's

1951 Mauchly and Eckert create UNIVAC, the first commercial computer; a year later, it successfully predicts a landslide for Eisenhower

MICROCHIP In 1958 Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently invent the microchip

1964 IBM launches the System/360 the first commercial mainframe computer

1969 Bell Labs creates Unix, an operating system that works across computer platforms

1974 The first personal computer kit, the Altair 8800, goes on sale for $439

1977 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak develop the Apple II

1981 IBM PC is Launched, using software from Bill Gates' Microsoft

1984 Apple, with a little help from Xerox PARC, releases the Macintosh

INTERNET

ARPA After Sputnik, Eisenhower in 1957 forms the Advanced Research Project Agency to coordinate research

1961 M.I.T. starts "time-sharing" computers, allowing several users to access one machine simultaneously

In 1964 Paul Baran of Rand Corp. calls for computer-based communications system that could survive a nuclear war

1967 Donald Davies devises "packet switching" as a way to route information through networks

1969 The ARPA Net--a network of university computers--is born

1974 Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn design Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for Linking different computer networks

1978 Programmer Ward Christensen writes MODEM (modulator-demodulator), allowing PCs to talk over public phone lines

1985 ARPA Net renamed the Internet

THE WEB Tim Berners-Lee creates an Internet protocol called the World Wide Web in 1990