Telecommunications History

Where is telecommunications going in the next five years? Let's look at the history of telecommunications and see if we can learn some lessons to help us build on the foundation of events past.
Electronic communications started with the simple teletype whereby current traveled along a cable and opened and closed a relay. By using a code of short and long relay closures or dots and dashes which became known as "Morse Code" a message code passed along a wire. This was the first major technological communication advance and it was huge. Instead of days or weeks for a message to make it across a state or country using the pony express; the message could be recieved in a matter of minutes or hours to decode the message and have it delivered locally.
The next advance in electronic communication was the ability to pass voice on the wire instead of the impersonal dots and dashes. This also made communication available to anyone instead of those skilled in the use of Morse Code. This advancement was possible because the discovery of pulse code modulation. In a nutshell, pulse code modulation takes a sampling of the multitude of tones made the human voice and transforms those tones into pulse or many dots and dashes! These pulses could transmitted relatively long distance on copper wire and the CODEC reassembles the pulse back into an excellent representation of human speech.