Digital Media in the Past and Present

Digital Media in the Past and Present

In today’s world digital media are everywhere, TV, newspapers, advertisements, and magazines. Almost everywhere you look you will find some sort of digital technology. Digital technology has come along way since the beginning of its time in. Although computers were invented long before; digital technology didn’t start to shine its light until the early 80’s. Originally, NASA developed digital imaging for the US space program in the 1960s (History of the digital camera, 2001). NASA needed a reliable way to get photographs back from the probes, which were never to return to the Earth. George Lucas combined with Adobe to help start the digital art movement with the creation of Photoshop. Companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Hewitt Packard, Kodak and Sony are a few of the top brands in digital design.

A brief history into the digital world mainly begins in 1984 when Sony released its first digital video camera. It used analog recording technology and saved data to a 2.5” floppy disk. The quality of these cameras was quite poor. At the same time Kodak came out with their 8mm camera, but had a hard time finding a buying market. Kodak eventually shut down the electronic photography division. Meanwhile Sony found the market, and began the digital boom. In 1985 the “Targa video card was introduced. It was a 24 bit color display card, that allowed the user to capture video images to the computer.” (www.home.eznet.net/) The first scanner was introduced in 1986, known as the Thunderscan digitizer. It used the Apple ImageWriter printer to capture the image, in black and white dots. And in 1990 Kodak introduced the first digital camera and photo CD.

There was also the introduction of imaging software ...

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...sroom" with "digital walls and ceiling" would not need a projector, the information and images would appear on the surrounding surfaces.” He also predicts that these types of projectors will to be able to project 3D images. For example if you were learning about the statue of David, at the click of a button the projector could make a replica of the statue and portray it in the middle of the room. Learning experience will become astronomical in a just a few years. Resources will just be unlimited.

The world today is becoming completely based on computers. Less then twenty years ago no one would have believed that almost every household in America would contain a personal computer. Now it’s rare not to own one, some houses contain multiple computers. For this reason its no wonder that the world is going digital. Digital technology just improves so many opportunities.