It242 Signals

It242 Signals

Data communications can encompass basically everything in the form of communication other than voice but is often limited to simple text-based communication out of convenience. As far as data communications go, e-mail is a relatively popular and simple form of data communication which offers the convenience of placing a message in a digital mailbox for the intended recipient. Rather than relying on the hit and miss capabilities of the telephone system when trying to reach someone, the e-mail is deposited in the digital mailbox and remains there until the recipient determines to do something with it. In data communications, the characters composing words are hard to transmit in actual form. As a result, text codes such as the International Reference Alphabet use 7-bit patterns capable of representing 128 different characters (very similar to binary).
Image communication is now a very important office component and similar, in a sense, to e-mail but on a more physical level. The fax machine is a great example of image communication allowing both text and pictures to be transmitted in a way that they can be printed out at their recipients’ destination. Text has already been covered, so image communication consists of either vector graphics or raster graphics. Vector graphics produce simple images by way of straight and curved lines and line segments. These graphics use binary codes to represent object type, size, and orientation which make them capable of being transmitted digitally. Raster graphics represent images as two-dimensional dots known as pixels; this is the main approach for fax. Raster graphics are transmitted as bit codes that represent pixels; each bit (or more than one bit for grayscale images) represents the shade of gray (or color in RBG schemes).
What used to be a one-way form of entertainment, video communication has also been growing in the office environment as videoconferencing. Videoconferencing further expands on the ability to communicate...