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|Growth of ICT can be seen to be broadly in terms of 4 ages - premechanical, mechanical, electromechanical and electronic age.  While  technology for information creation, storage and processing has been developing continuously, one important development which changed the course of technology is the development of digital technologies in the electronic area.  Whereas during the electromechanical area, information was stored largely stored in analog formats.

|Growth of ICT can be seen to be broadly in terms of 4 ages - premechanical, mechanical, electromechanical and electronic age.  While  technology for information creation, storage and processing has been developing continuously, one important development which changed the course of technology is the development of digital technologies in the electronic area.  Whereas during the electromechanical area, information was stored largely stored in analog formats. During the electronic age, information was stored in analog and digital formats. 

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==Analog and digital technologies==

==Analog and digital technologies==

During the mechanical and electric analog phases of technology, information was created by a series of physical changes converted into electrical impulses for storing and  machine, and each analog information storage required a specialized equipment to decode and read the information. A cassette player or a gramaphone disc is an example of such a device.  Representing information for computing using physical changes often meant that the results could not be accurate as the changes could not be replicated exactly.  Analog machines could be programmed for specific applications as well as for generalized computation.

 

During the mechanical and electric analog phases of technology, information was created by a series of physical changes converted into electrical impulses for storing and  machine, and each analog information storage required a specialized equipment to decode and read the information. A cassette player or a gramaphone disc is an example of such a device.  Analog machines could be programmed for specific applications as well as for generalized computation. Representing information for computing using physical changes often meant that the results could not be accurate as the changes could not be replicated exactly.   

See below how a difference engine, designed by Charles Babbage worked.

See below how a difference engine, designed by Charles Babbage worked.

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  What makes our society now different from ever before is the presence of digital technologies.  

An important breakthrough came when the binary system was invented. In the binary system information can in a series of "0"s and "1"s thus allowing information to be accessed through only a combination of "1"s and "0"s.  This allowed information to be communicated in discrete bits which could be combined and recombined. Such a computer which uses "0"s and "1"s to perform computations a digital computer. What makes our society now different from ever before is the presence of digital technologies. Combined with the development of new methods of designing circuits like transistors and micro chips, it became possible to design computers which performed computations using digital methods.  This improved the reliability and ease of computations significantly over the analog machines.  The digital electronics changed operations in many applications including manufacturing, however the impact on ICT has been almost revolutionary.