Digital data

Mathematician George Stibitz of Bell Telephone Laboratories used the word digital in reference to the fast electric pulses emitted by a device designed to aim and fire anti-aircraft guns in 1942.

[2] When a new symbol has been entered, the device typically sends an interrupt, in a specialized format, so that the CPU can read it.

For devices with only a few switches (such as the buttons on a joystick), the status of each can be encoded as bits (usually 0 for released and 1 for pressed) in a single word.

But it does not scale to support more keys than the number of bits in a single byte or word.

It is estimated that in the year 1986, less than 1% of the world's technological capacity to store information was digital and in 2007 it was already 94%.

The confidentiality, integrity, and availability have to be managed during the entire lifecycle from 'birth' to the destruction of the data.