Computers think by toggling billions of tiny electronic switches, on and off, the zeros and ones called binary. It's been the best method devised. But could computers be analog?
The preseumption that more is better, of more levels (analog), 4, 20, or even 50, doesn’t prevail here. The behavior of electronics dictates the number of numbers used to compute most efficiently. Computing demands precision and repeatability. An analog computer would have to be renamed, an analog estimator.
Everything we see on our computer monitor is represented in numbers from inside the computer’s many circuits. The icons, buttons, and even that picture from Aunt Irene sent via an email attachment, are all converted from zeros and ones, binary digits.
A floppy disk stores those spreadsheets and business presentations in a sea of numbers. Open a picture file from a word processor or text editor and you’ll see a screen of gibberish that are the numeric instructions for displaying it. It certainly means nothing to us humans, but to the logic of the binary computer, it’s just right.
Numbers we understand (base 10) are converted into numbers that a binary computer understands (base 2) and back again, with the computer doing the work for us.
Televisions, radios, tape/video recorders, and telephones, particularly the older ones, all used analog circuitry. As the volume and tonal frequency of a concert changed, so did the electronic voltages and currents to match. Vacuum tubes were ideal for this.
The eventual adaptation of modern consumer electronics to digital was reluctant, considered illogical. The compelling need was more for compatibility with computers than an advantage of quality—a happy accident, as it turned out.
Analog computers were built early on, but their design was abandoned. They were slower and inaccurate. Voltages did not change instantaneously. Measuring those values, for numbers greater than 2, was a complex method of timing.
But the simplicity of a small voltage being there or being zero was elegant. It meant that sounds were clear, colors crisp, and calculations precise and fast. Increased resolution was accomplished by pairing more samples for greater detail, better than any analog system ever could. Zeros and ones (voltage/ no-voltage) quickly became the low-level binary system used in every computer.
Systems designers, early on, realized that man-handling streams of ones and zeros was foolhardy. Reorganizing these into a series of three bite-sized pieces became known as an octal (base 8), but was flawed.
Three-bit groupings are not divisible by 2 evenly. No problem; they just grouped bits by 4s. However, converting the 16 unique values into our numbering system (base 10) didn’t fit. So the first six letters from the alphabet was borrowed. For instance, the number 32,767 is 7FFF in hexadecimal
The computer keyboard has a maximum of 256 possible characters or symbols (ASCII), some requiring the Option/Alt and/or Shift depressed plus a key. Each key is represented by a string of 8 bits, called a byte. For example, the capitol letter A is represented as 01000001 in binary.
In the 1970s, computers used 256 levels simultaneously, called 8-bit. Modern computers now use 32, 64 or even 128 bits at a time. Think of it as a multi-laned highway, automobile traffic coming and going like a time-lapse movie, each car representing one-bit.
Sending information long distances, such as over the Internet, in the same parallel way as in the computer doesn’t work. So instead, streams of data are transmitted in series. As a result, the fastest dial-up Internet connection today is many times slower than a computer’s internal processes.
An area of intense interest to scientists these days is in a vastly different process called quantum computing, using Quantum Bits (qubits). So unfamiliar to our linear reality that it almost hurts to think about. Basically, they allow their black box (computer) to be in all states simultaneously, both on and off. By being able to ask exactly the correct question, the right answer emerges.
Two and four Qubit machines (commercially impractical) are being tested. Positive results, primarily in the field of cryptography (code cracking), push researchers forward.
The only thing in our lives that is constant is change. We shouldn’t rule out anything. Other research in biological based storage, holographic, optical, and electrochemical computers might reopen the multilevel (analog) process as cost effective.
But for now, it’s one-bit at a time, billions of them every second.
Amazing.