Data types

Computer and communication systems work with many types of data or data types. The first computers worked on numeric data (that is why they were called "computers"). From the start, people understood that computers could process other data types, but they were very expensive, so text processing, image processing, etc. were restricted to research labs and prototypes. As technology has progressed, affordable computers could do more and more, and these research programs moved into general use. The following table shows the decades in which the processing of selected types of data became economically feasible:

Decade Data Type
1950s Numeric
1960s Alphanumeric
1970s Text
1980s Images, speech
1990s Music, low-quality video
2000s High-quality video

Here is a four minute video on emerging video applications and the load it will put on the Internet.

These are broad categories, and there are many data encoding schemes and file formats within each -- many video formats, many image formats, etc. FileExtensions.org and Dotwhat.net are reference sources on file extensions, and Wikipedia has articles on most of them.

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