Machine in the Ghost

the long version

This book tackles this fundamental question by exploring the origins of the digital and showing how digital technology works. It goes back to 1874, when a French telegraph engineer, Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot, invented the first means of digital communication, the Baudot code. From this simple 5-bit code, it takes us to the first electronic computers, to the earliest uses of graphics and information systems in the 1950s, our interactions with computers through punch cards and programming languages, and the rise of digital media in the 1970s. Via various and sometimes unanticipated historical routes, this book reveals the foundations of digitality and how it has flourished in today's explosion of technologies and the forms of communication and media they enable, making real the often intangible force that guides so much of our lives.