Hi, Leland.

>...I wonder who came up with the orginal idea of a two state system (eg binary), which would hold either 1 or 0, true, fales, on or off. It hard to imagine what complicated and wonderful devices exits today from such a simple origin.

Claude Shannon, of course. He's the father of modern binary logic. You can read his fundational work "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html

In it, he not only describes the most basic binary logic operations, but also hints its use in complex systems to allow for digital communication (quite near to what we know today as image, sound and video compression, encryption, etc).

He's most daring predecessor could be George Bool, who defined what we know today as boolean algebra.

Really clever guys, indeed.

There's a lot of interesting stories along the history of our job/industry. I like to read about it from time to time.

Best regards,