OT teach me a word

basically -- it goes back to the binary code (digits) used way back when for programming computers.

Today -- digital means "electronic" (which has nothing to do with an outlet or a plug) or "computer-related". Digital camera -- computerized camera that records images in computer code for viewing and printing via a computer (not traditional dark room techniques). Digital Music -- no more Walkmans... everybody is moving to MP3 players. (MP3 is a file type -- the player has a computer hard drive that stores the files so you can play them back.)

Digital Music -- MP3 files or other computer files that enable you to transfer music from audio cassettes or CD's to your computer or your cell phone or MP3 player.

Basically -- it is sounds or images or documents that are created, viewed or stored on a computer (or computer devices like CD's or other Flash Drives or Smart Drives or .....Compact Flash Cards or SD Cards....)

Does that help?

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

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

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.

Applying that to music storage, if the storage method can store any value within a range, then it's not digital, examples would be cassette tapes and records, whereas a file you'd put on a modern player like an ipod is just a series of 0s and 1s, the clever bit is firstly converting the sounds from the instruments or voices to this without losing anything, then from that turning it back into sounds that our ears can't distinguish from the original.

This thread is making my brain hurt :-) I think I'll just continue in blessed ignorance throwing around the word "digital" with only a vague notion of what I'm actually talking about. :-) Wayyyy OT: I just today learned that a "digital bugle" has been developed due to the fact that there is a shortage of military buglers to play Taps at funerals. Basically the bugle plays itself, and the bugler just sort of pretends to play the thing. So, is the baby grand "player piano" in the foyer of the hospital actually a "digital baby grand"?? Things to ponder. Now my brain really hurts. Just rambling, not intending to hijack your thread, Polly. Going to bed now. :-)

Sherry

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.

Morag

I'm more with you than with people who really understand this stuff. But here goes: we used to have only "analog", which means information stored as a physical representation, like the little bumps on a vinyl disk that made the record player needle vibrate exactly the same way as the original sound did, so we heard a copy of that sound. (And we got static because dust and scratches made the needle vibrate too.) Now we have "digital", meaning the information is stored as numbers. Instead of ink on a page or bumps on a vinyl groove, the words or music are stored as numbers. It can be read by any computer device programmed to read it. (Although the sound you hear, in the case of music, will be only as good as your speakers, but that was always the case.) If you know how, you can even go into the file and change the numbers, which is what some people do to ancient analog recordings to get rid of all the static. I use this example because DH is a music nut and keeps telling me why he has to have new versions of pieces he already owns on vinyl. Roberta in D

"Polly Esther" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

Makes my brain hurt too, and I also have a terrible cold and sniffles and generally feel sorry for myself. What a cruel topic! Once saw a player piano (the analog kind, with paper rolls punched full of holes that made the piano keys bang up and down) owned previously by someone whose mission in life was to get famous composers and virtuosi to play and make recordings for him. The museum had stacks of these rolls, and frankly it was a little creepy to watch the piano play itself according to the "ghost" of e.g. Scott Joplin or Toscanini. Roberta in D

"Sherry" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...

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...

"Polly Esther" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

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 ;)

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.

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, 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

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.

G>

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

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

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

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