What’s the difference between ‘A’ and ‘a’? … 1

My education around the Internet grew-up around the understanding of data communications, and then onto networking, and finally a core understand of how the whole of the Internet worked. At the communications layer, you very quickly understand that there’s a lot of noise around, and where you were often sending digital pulses along lines that were designed for voice communications. The core concept was thus understanding the good part of the message: the signal, and the bad part of it: the noise. For this, I am always reminded of Peter Gabriel’s lyrics:

And in this place, can you reassure me
With a touch, a smile — while the cradle’s burning
All the while the world is turning to noise
Oh the more that it’s surrounding us
The more that it destroys
Turn up the signal
Wipe out the noise

At the core of this was Shannon theory, and who defined that the capacity of a channel varied with the ratio of the signal to the noise:

C = B log2 (1+S/N)

and where B is the bandwidth. So if the bandwidth was 100 MHz, and the signal to noise ratio is 10:1, we get:

C = 10e6 log2(1+10) = 34 Mbps

And so we have noisy channels, where the noise sometimes caused errors in our bits. And thus we implemented error detection methods where we could tell if at least of…