The Science of Computing

During the last three decades (1978–2008), we have witnessed worldwide an unprecedented revolution: the venue of the digital world. Nowadays there is no doubt that digital music players or digital cameras have replaced their analog counterparts forever (or at least until the next paradigm shift). But what are the benefits of this analog-to-digital wave since the industry is still working hard to reach the recording/rendering qualities of some prior analog devices. The first merit of the digital world is to dissociate contents from its support. Once digitized contents are all binary strings of zeros and ones, this “binarization” process harmonizes all former kinds of contents (books, musics, pictures an videos) into a universal representation: strings of bits.