Probably the biggest need for communication was for the trains back in the nineteenth century. In the 1840s and ‘50s, railroads were being built across the country until finally in 1865, East met West at Promontory Point, Utah. But the need of communications between the stations was very important. Two Englishmen, both electrical engineers, patented a telegraph that used six wires and several magnetic needles and a very delicate receiver. They were hoping that the United States and the railroad companies would adopt their design and use their system to communicate between the stations.

However, a year before, an American inventor patented his own work, which only used two wires. His name was Samuel Morse and he had worked on this system for over twelve years. It was quite a gamble and he was nearly broke. Six years later, 50 stations were using the Morse telegraph. By that time, a company was formed called Western Union and soon everyone relied on the telegraph to transmit and receive messages.

Western Union expanded to over 4,000 offices and at the dawning of the new century, Western Union became the biggest communications giant in the world. They had over a million miles of cable laid between towns and even had two cables laid across the Atlantic Ocean.

Samuel Morse came up with a way to represent a code for each letter in the Alphabet including spacing, numbers, and punctuation marks. An operator would become very fluent in reading the dots and dashes to write down the message. He or she would then transmit the response, using the telegraph in the other direction, using another set of wires. This is because the telegraph was only a one-way operation. Alexander Bell was working on a multiplexed telegraph before he discovered the telephone. It would be much easier and cheaper to use one set of wires instead of two.

Needless to say, many years later the teletypewriter, or teletype, was invented and soon the need for a Morse code operator went away. However, the codes sent to represent each character were still a major part of the operation. By the time the teletypewriter was in full operation, the codes had changed from Morse to Baudot. You see the problem with the Morse code was that each character was a different length. For example, the number zero was five dashes, but the letter "E" was just a dot. This made it easy to decipher by the human ear, but very difficult to decode mechanically. So the Baudot was used because every code was an equal length and could represent 32 combinations. To get more out of this code, they used two combinations as a non-printable code to represent a shift to get more characters, representing 62 altogether.

The Baudot code was used up until the 1960s and in 1966, several companies got together to come up with something even better. It was called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. It used 7 bits instead of five, giving it a total of 128 characters, and it did not need a shift in order to represent the upper and lower case alphabets, numbers, and punctuation marks. It had extra functions to represent carriage returns, backspaces, and line feeds. It even used a protocol to send the codes across the lines. It used a parity character or bit to toggle whether or not it transmitted an even amount of characters or an odd amount of characters.

IBM extended this many years later, when the first IBM PCs came out with 8 bits and had another 127 characters to use, with which they represented line drawing characters and international punctuation marks.

Of course there are other numbering systems used by computers, and they all use the same characters in order of the ASCII numbering system. Let’s take Binary for example. Every computer in the world made today uses just ones and zeros to toggle bits back and forth. For example: Let’s take the letter "A," which is capitalized. In ASCII it is represented by the number 65. But let’s break this down. How does it represent the sixty-fifth character? Was this just the order it was created in? Well, sort of. If we look at the binary system and how it is laid out, you can see it more clearly. First let’s start with our decimal system. When we count from 1 to 10, we start out using one column representing a number. Since we only have ten numbers ranging from zero to nine, we have to carry the next number to the next column. So if we look at the numbering system more closely, we have a ones column, a tens column, a hundreds column and so forth. Like this:

In the binary system, we only have two characters, zero and one. So when we reach more than one, we have to carry over the one to the next column. It looks like this:

The only exception here is that in the binary system, we use 8 positions instead of four. So it would really be:

If we look at the above example, we can see that we have one sixty-four and one one and when we add them up, we have sixty-five, which in the ASCII chart represents the Uppercase Letter "A."

Now, when programmers came along and started programming these codes into computers, they discovered it was hectic trying to code in machine language. So they came up with another system called hexadecimal. This used only two columns to represent eight bits. It did this by extending the decimal system and using characters in place of the ten through fifteen. For example, the number ten was represented by A, eleven by B, and up to fifteen, which used F. Counting the number zero as the first character, this gave us a sixteen-bit numbering system. Let’s break this one down. Here is the same Letter "A."

Each column used in hex represents four bits on each side of a byte. So if we look at the binary breakdown again and then break it down to two parts:

Now we look at it and it represents "41" in hex. Remember though, if the numbers count up to more than 9, we start using letters. For example, in the following:

which represents "4D," or the letter "M."

There are a couple more numbering systems, like octal and some that did not catch on. However, it is strange how we have adopted from Morse code to ones and zeros to communicate from one side of the country to another. Where would we be if we had not started with Samuel Morse’s easy code.

That is enough communications for a while. See ya next month.