History
The most famous early systematic use of error detection was by Jewish scribes in the precise copying of the Jewish bible, beginning before Christ. An emphasis on minute details of words and spellings evolved into the idea of a perfect text in 135 CE, and with it increasingly forceful strictures that a deviation in even a single letter would make a Torah scroll invalid. The scribes used methods such as summing the number of words per line and per page (Numerical Masorah), and checking the middle paragraph, word and letter against the original. The page was thrown out if a single mistake was found, and three mistakes on a single page would result in the entire manuscript being destroyed (the equivalent of retransmission on a telecommunications channel). The effectiveness of their methods was verified by the accuracy of copying through the centuries demonstrated by discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-1956, dating from c.150 BCE-75 CE.
Read more about this topic: Error Detection And Correction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)