ABSTRACT
When digital filters first arose they were viewed 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 which was made endlessly by people in the early days of computers. I was told repeatedly, until I was sick of hearing it, 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 vs. humans. Typically a single order of magnitude change (a factor of 10) produces fundamentally new effects, and computers are many, many times faster than hand computations. Those who claimed 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.
