OT teach me a word

Morag in Scotland wrote:
Digital means that something is saved to the computer rather than
something else. So with a digital camera, you save the pictures on the
computer rather than on a film. Same with a Digital video recorder, you
save the images on the computer and not on a tape.

And the information is recorded as a series of numbers rather than
magnetically, as it was on video or audio tape, or as waves on the old
wax cylinders...

Morag

"Polly Esther" wrote in message
...
Last year I learned bling and blog with your help. This week I've
discovered skew. For reasons totally obscure to my old brain, 'skew'
is what you want when you're trying to figure out how to reduce or
make smaller. At least that's how Windows, in its infinite wisdom,
uses the word.
Now. In little words and short sentences, could you please explain
the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think it all started when
clock faces began showing funny looking numbers. Lately it seems
that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're meaning. I
don't need to take anything apart and examine how it works, I just
need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone? Polly [
p.s. I'm pleased to note that SpellCheck denies the existence of
bling and blog; at least I'm ahead of it.]




--
Kate XXXXXX R.C.T.Q Madame Chef des Trolls
Lady Catherine, Wardrobe Mistress of the Chocolate Buttons
http://www.katedicey.co.uk
Click on Kate's Pages and explore!

"Polly Esther" wrote in message
...
could you please explain the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think
it all started when clock faces began showing funny looking numbers.
Lately it seems that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're
meaning. I just need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone?
Polly

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val

"Polly Esther" wrote in message
...
Last year I learned bling and blog with your help. This week I've
discovered skew. For reasons totally obscure to my old brain, 'skew' is
what you want when you're trying to figure out how to reduce or make
smaller. At least that's how Windows, in its infinite wisdom, uses the
word.

In graphics at least, "skew" means to twist or distort, not reduce or
enlarge.

I'm pretty sure that "skew" means twist or distort overall, not just in
graphics. Like "Jane has a skewed perspective" - it means her view isn't
politically correct or socially acceptable.


Now. In little words and short sentences, could you please explain
the
word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think it all started when clock
faces began showing funny looking numbers. Lately it seems that
everything
is digital and I have no clue what they're meaning. I don't need to take
anything apart and examine how it works, I just need a very simple
understanding of the word. Anyone? Polly [ p.s. I'm pleased to note
that SpellCheck denies the existence of bling and blog; at least I'm ahead
of it.]

Today, digital is anything, really, that involves a computer - whether the
computer that you're using now or any piece of technology that uses computer
(such as the "mini-computers" in toys nowadays). If it's using a computer,
it's digital.

Val wrote:
.........snipped (would snipped = 1010010?).......
Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?
.......snipped = 1010010........ IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!"
.......snipped = 1010010.............
011101100100000101001100
Val

Val, did I get it right?? Does the word snipped = 1010010 in binary?
I gotta tell you -- I sat here and wrote down the alphabet with 8
letters to a row and then put 1 or 0 above the columns so I could figure
that one silly word out -- LOLOL!
As for the IBM - parity bit - HAL thing -- that's just TOO much of a
coincidence NOT to be true! I had to call DH (who understands computer
stuff fairly well for an aero enginerd) and read what you wrote about
it! I didn't have to read anything about 2001: Space Odyssey, he just
got that part and started laughing like a person possessed. He plans on
sharing the story with all the other nerds he works with -- LOLOL!
CiaoMeow ^;;^

PAX, Tia Mary ^;;^ (RCTQ Queen of Kitties)
Angels can't show their wings on earth but nothing was ever said about
their whiskers!
Visit my Photo albums at http://community.webshots.com/user/tiamary

Thank you. Thank you all. For at least the next 90 minutes I'm going to
have to go do something totally mindless because I believe we may have used
up my brain for a little while. We won't brag that I got it all but my
understanding digital is vastly improved. I so much appreciate your
explanations and sympathy. Now. Let's go do something easy. How about a
miniature Lone Star? Polly

ok, Val, now my head hurts, I just flipped through your reply. It
really is interesting, but right now I am not interested. Back in the
late 60's when computers took up a whole room, the military tried to
recruit me since I scored so high on some tests that"normally the boys
are the only ones to understand" [their words not mine] and had to do
with computers.
I am self-proclaimed techno-geekless since then, not interested in
electronics or digital things. Give me a pad of paper, an ink pen or
Ticonderoga pencil any time! You can see what you are writing, see
your mood, see all the nuances of your words on paper.

Ginger in CA
no VCR, no DVD, no MP3, such a disappointment to some of my friends

On Oct 11, 4:36 am, "Val" wrote:
"Polly Esther" wrote in message

...

could you please explain the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think
it all started when clock faces began showing funny looking numbers.
Lately it seems that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're
meaning. I just need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone?
Polly

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val

Fantastic - only word for you and this explanation. Truly wonderful!!
We tend not to use the word 'awesome' much over here, but that is the
word for it.
..
In message , Val
writes

"Polly Esther" wrote in message
...
could you please explain the word 'digital' with today's meaning? I think
it all started when clock faces began showing funny looking numbers.
Lately it seems that everything is digital and I have no clue what they're
meaning. I just need a very simple understanding of the word. Anyone?
Polly

It's simple to understand, it maybe isn't to explain......

Gather 'round boys and girls and listen to the OLLLLLDDDD computer
programmer who actually programmed in binary......we'll get back to that.
This will be explained and then gradually and hopefully understood in much
the same way that little hand held game works, the one where the BBs roll
around until they all fall into the little holes......there maybe some BBs
rolling around loose from time to time but hopefully they will all be snug
in the little holes at the end of this explanation.

In this case digit means number, not finger or toe.

Digital clocks came by their name because the actual numbers (digits)
flipped as time marched on, not complicated, kind of fun, no big and little
hands, hence an entire generation that has little or no concept of clockwise
or counter clockwise......see there Polly, you're already smarter than a
fifth grader!! These clocks were not computers, they were just called
digital because of the numbers and it sounded more impressively scientific
(and expensive) than "flippin' clock".

Now to why the "digital" with computer stuff. For a simple visual aid we
will all hold our a chopstick and put it through the holes of two donuts.
Hold the chopstick straight up, tilt the bottom donut like this \ , the one
above like this / . The one like this \ has a positive electrical charge,
we give it the #1 to use when writing out actual code humans can read (once,
long ago there WERE actual humans who DID read this code like you are
reading this sentence, I was one of them; very skeerrry)....the other like
this / has a negative charge, we give that the #0.....two numbers = bi-nary
code, that is what the computer reads, negative is OFF = #0, positive is ON
= #1. An electronic computer *anything* is just an electro magnet; same
thing that picks up squashed cars in the wrecking yard but has a bit more
finesse in the actual structure. No electrical impulse, the computer doesn't
work....dead batteries, your camera or iPod doesn't work. The old computers
I worked with actually had these donuts on wires finer than human hair and a
few thousand donuts would fit in a thimble and I have NO idea who built
these machines, they were obviously even less sane than
programmers.....bazillions of little donuts and you could hear them clicking
as they flipped back and forth with the negative and positive charges
pulsing in the machine. One donut is a BIT....8 donuts are a BYTE, half a
byte is four donuts and it's called a NIBBLE, aint that cute!..(there's a
ninth donut in there but you don't need to know about parity bits. *see foot
note if you are so inclined). in 8 bit code called octal (8) you can count
the numbers (donuts) with the potato song.......one potato, two potato,
three potato, four, five potato, six potato, seven potato, MORE......'more'
is zero, a place holder ....1,2,3,4,5,6,7,0......same as zero is a place
holder in counting in decimal.....that's 1234567890. 10 is one ten and no
ones; 20 is 2 tens, the zero is a place holder (no ones) until you add
three....2 tens and 3 ones...23!! and so on.

A computer only knows negative and positive, it reads and spits out that
binary code and then it's translated with other coding programs to be more
advanced and easier to read and write so us regular human people can
understand what the machine is telling us. This is why power fluctuations
and not fully charged batteries can screw up what your computer or camera is
doing or it doesn't do anything at all...........sort of like very low or
high blood sugar in people, things start to malfunction. Also why you keep
magnets away from the working guts of a computer. They are not as sensitive
now as they once were.....we had a computer crash because the maintenance
man had a magnetized switch on his flashlight in his pocket and he walked
through the mainframe computer room......that doesn't happen anymore.

A digital picture is comprised of pixels, these pixels are actually hunks of
binary coding that "codes the picture you take" and spits it out all
translated in colors using each individual pixel. The programming arranges
all the pixels in the right order and you have a PICTURE the human eye can
"read" or see. If you have the right equipment, which you most likely don't,
NOR do you need, you can keep enlarging a digital camera's picture until all
you have are solid colored squares, and if you enlarge it even more, pretty
soon these squares will be lots of squares inside squares that are all black
and white (even on color pictures).....black-white, on-off,
negative-positive, 0-1...it's a computer DIGITAL code! How 'bout that! But
since your camera reads and compresses (translates) this code you not only
have colored squares, you have an arrangement of colored squares that are
translated and now MEAN something to the human eye. Those old donuts have
been replaced by transistors and transponders and trans atlantics and maybe
trans fats and all kinds of fancy teeny little trans things that do all this
work in nano seconds, faster than the blink of an eye.....even faster than a
3 year old!

Digital music is the same but translates digital code to tones, then to
notes and then to music with mixing and tracks and tweaking all by digital
programming code. The computer (iPod or whatever) reads the digital
(*numbers* in the machine language) code written to the disc and then sends
it on so humans ears hear music from the speakers.

What it boils down to is that the absolute, most basic computer language is
based on two numbers (digits) zero and one that makes all electronic
computer everythings work. An abacus is a computer too, but it's not
electronic. All a computer does is calculate these series of numbers
(digits) to a *digital* translation so it's something human type people can
understand; like come up with a balance on your checkbook (that may be a
poor example), a picture in your camera, words on your monitor and music
from electronic speakers (you do not hear your disc, you hear the digital
translation of the code on the disc thru your speakers, your quilt programs
and so on and so on.

Digital just means that you have an electronic computer *something* that
uses a low level basic machine language code which is comprised of numbers
that were assigned to identify electrical impulses to become more
complicated codes to calculate, which is now practically synonymous with
create.....when referring to a lot of digital stuff.

Have you begun to have the vapors yet, Miss Polly?
To Polly's computer that sentence looks like this.....

01000100011011110010000001111001011011110
11101010010000001101000011000010111011001
10010100100000011101000110100001100101001
00000011101100110000101110000011011110111
00100111001100100000011110010110010101110
10000101100001000000110110101101001011100
11011100110010000001110000011011110110110
0011011000111100100111111 Really it does, find an old programmer to read
it to you LOL So how are you doing with the BBs folks?

Oh, for the *footnote on parity bits. 2001: Space Odyssey, about the
computer named HAL that began trying to take over.....Hexadecimal is (16
bit) machine language ( 0123456789ABCDEF) all bytes have a parity bit (the
extra one that nobody counts or assigns a name/number to) but if it isn't in
sync with the rest, the hex code is really screwed up. IBM computers use
hexadecimal machine language, if the parity bit is off it shifts the code
one place over and "IBM" will be spelled out "HAL". My programming team
decided we deserved a very long lunch and went and saw 2001: Space Odyssey
the first week it came out. When the computer introduced it self as HAL we
all fell out of our seats laughing in a packed, dead quiet theater because
we got the joke,"IBM is whacked out buggy!" We were employed with Sperry
Univac (corporate rivals)......we were called nerds then, a geek was
something different all together. This IBM joke has been denied by Clarke
and Kubrick, that it was NOT a slam at IBM.........however, Sperry Rand
subsidiaries did a great deal of financing for Kubrick's projects so WE knew
better .............and then I became a heavy construction truck driver. The
End

011101100100000101001100
Val





--
Best Regards
pat on the hill

How about how an 8 year old explained it after I explained it to them?

"There are four kinds of electrical circuits that make things work.
One kind is made of just wires and switches.
Another kind are called called tube circuits, because they use glass
tubes in them like old televisions, very old radios, or Mommy and
Daddy's guitar amps.
Solid state circuits are ones with transistors in them instead of
tubes, and are made with the wies stuck though boards so nohing moves
around.
Digital circuits are a special kind of solid state circuit. They have
special parts made out of quartz that are called Integrated Circuits,
most people just call them chips or ICs. ICs are special because you
can make just one of them do the same thing as a great big circuit of
any of the other kinds. You can put a whole computer on one IC. They
call these digital circuits because computers can only count, and they
can only count from zero to one. In high school math and bigger each
number is called a digit, so the way we talk to computers and the way
computers talk is called digital. Everything that computers do,
whether it is adding up the prices when mommy is buying something
online, or playing Happy Birthday for you on your keyboard, they do by
arranging those two digits, zero and one, in different ways."

*Spelling corrected, punctuation beyond periods added, memories of
pulling my hair out while helping the kid tucked up, second grade
science project (A-) carefully put back in the folder with the other
special papers.*

NightMist


On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 22:56:19 -0500, "Polly Esther"
wrote:

I don't think I'm there yet. Anyone here explain things to 3 year-olds?
We just had an exhausting visit with a 3 year-old and were dazzled by her
questions and comprehension. Maybe I should have just asked her what
digital means. Polly

"Anne Rogers" wrote in message
...
digital means you use a fixed set of numbers or symbols, rather than
anywhere in a range, so a digital clock displays 1.35 for a minute, until
it switches to 1.36, whereas an analog clock slowly moves between the two
points and can represent any value in between.

Anything related to a computer is digital because at the base level,
everything is zero or one.

With things like radio, the "old" system is analog as the transmission is
via radiowaves which are a like a wiggly line and a point on it can have
any value. By switching to digital the wave looks like the ramparts of a
castle, either zero or one, but it gets messed around as it's transmitted,
but because the receiver knows it's zero or one it can be reconstructed
with a high degree of accuracy, which wasn't the case when the value could
be anything in a range, if it got distorted then it got distorted and
there was no way to reconstruct it.

Cheers
Anne




--

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the
majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with
the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
- AA Milne

Val:
that was excellent! i read the whole thing. Just knowing that when i
hit a key on my keyboard is translated twice (once to the computer
language then back to human language) is fascinating.

No-wonder you drive a truck...i'd need a rest too!!! =)
amy in CNY

lets try it this way, if you count on your fingers, what numbers can you
represent, probably 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and maybe some
halves if you can bend fingers individually - so how do you represent
3.75, you can't. If you draw a line 10 inches long and label it every
inch you can represent any number between 0 and 10. The first example is
analog, the 2nd digital.

MAJOR ooopsy, I got them the wrong way round, the first example, the
fingers is digital, the 2nd, the line is analogue!

--
Cheers

Anne
http://baltimorealbum.blogspot.com/