The telegraph and Morse code laid the groundwork for modern computing from "summary" of Code by Charles Petzold
The idea that the telegraph and Morse code are the precursors of modern computing may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, the telegraph is a device for sending messages over long distances using electrical signals, while computing involves complex calculations and data processing. However, upon closer inspection, the similarities between the two become apparent. The telegraph was one of the earliest forms of electrical communication, allowing people to send messages across vast distances almost instantaneously. By encoding these messages into a series of short and long electrical pulses, known as dots and dashes, the telegraph operators could transmit information in a binary form. This binary encoding is analogous to the way computers store and process data using ones and zeros. Morse code, developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1830s, was the system used to translate alphabetic characters and numbers into these dots and dashes. Each letter or number was represented by ...
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