In the past decade, the amount of data that could be put on a silicon chip has doubled every year while the price has been cut in half. In 1960, a high-quality transistorcost several dollars. Today a chip with the capacity of 4 million transistors costs about a tenth of a cent per transistor.
最近十年中，集成电路片的信息储存量每年要翻一番，而其价格则每年要减一半。1960年，一个高质量晶体管价格要若干美元，而今一个容量相当于400万个晶体管的集成电路片的价格约为每个晶体管1/10美分。
Transmission-putting that information into the hands of everyone who wants it-is also much more efficient. Until now, data have been sent as a series of electrical signals along wires or cables or through the air as radio waves. But as the amount of data and the demand for them have increased, these electronic highways have become clogged. The solution: fiber optics.
信息传输--将信息输送到每个需要者手中--的效率也有了很大提高。直到现在，信息一直是以一连串电子信号的方式通过电线传输或以电波的形式通过空气传输。但随着信息量和信息需求量的增多，这些电子运输公路已形成堵塞。解决问题的办法是使用光纤电缆。　　
Both of these developments are possible because of digitalization , a mathematical scheme that translates data into the simplest form. Called binary formatting, the sys-tem expresses numbers and letters in a code using only 1 and 0. The letter A, for example, could be 00000. Z would be 11001. Originally, this code was stored as on-or-off electrical charges along the standard wires and cables; now it can be transmitted as pulses of light on the fiber-op-tic cables. Bringing high-speed computers into the loop means that much more complicated information can be digitized: combinations of sound, still images, video and text. Multimedia is the wrong word, says MIT's Negroponte. Everything has now become digitized, he says. We have created a unimedia, really. Bits are bits.
这两方面的发展提高全赖于数字编码技术的应用。数字编码技术是将信息转换成最简单的数字形式的数学方法。这种方法称作二进制数字排列法，任何数字或字母都可以通过一个由1和0组成的编码来表示。比如，字母A可用00000表示，字母Z可用11001表示。起初，这种编码是以时断时续通过标准导线或电缆的电荷存储于计算机里的，而现在则可以光波的形式通过光纤电缆传送。只要将高速计算机接上光纤电线，就可以用数字编码方法来处理复杂得多的信息：声音、静止图像、电视画面和文字相结合的信息。麻省理工学院的尼格罗邦特认为，多媒体一词用得不当。他说，现在什么都可以用数字编码表示了。我们其实是创造了一种单媒体。数字可不能混淆。