How We've Become Digital

By Chris Taylor and Unmesh Kher Sunday, Mar. 21, 1999
    • 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.