Do it by the numbers—digital shorthand
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Open Access
- 1 October 1960
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 3 (10) , 530-536
Abstract
Present communications systems transmit single characters in groups of coded pulses between simple terminal equipments. Since English words form only a sparse set of all possible alphabetic combinations, present methods are inefficient when computer systems are substituted for these terminals. Using numeric representations of entire words or common phrases (rather than character-by-character representations) requires approximately one-third of present transmission time. This saving is reflected in overall costs. Other benefits accrue in code and language translation schemes. Provision is made for transmission of purely numeric and/or binary streams, and for single character-transmission of non-dictionary words such as the names of people of places.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Prediction and Entropy of Printed EnglishBell System Technical Journal, 1951
- Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds1923