Digital Filters - II.
When digital filters first arose they were involved merely as a variant of the
classical analog filters; people did not see them as essentially new and different.
This is exactly the same mistake that was made endlessly by people in the early
days of computers. I was told repeatedly, until I was sick of hearing it, that
computers were nothing more than large, fast desk calculators.
"Anything you can do by a machine you can do by hand." So they said.
This simply ignores the speed, accuracy, reliability, and lower costs of
the machines versus humans. Typically a single order of magnitude change
(a factor to 10) produces fundamentally new effects, and computers are many,
many times faster than hand computations. Those who claimed that there was
no essential difference never made any significant contributions to the
development of computers. Those who did make significant contributions viewed
computers as something new to be studied on their own merits and not as merely
more of the same old desk calculators, perhaps souped up a bit.
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