A General Communication System

Title

A General Communication System

Description

By a communication system, we will mean a system of the type indicated schematically in [the Figure]. It consists of essentially five parts.1. An information source which produces a message or sequence of messages to be communicated to the receiving terminal. … 2. A transmitter which operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel.3. The channel is merely the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter to receiver. … During transmission, or at one of the terminals, the signal may be perturbed by noise. This is indicated schematically in [the Figure] by the noise source acting on the transmitted signal to produce the received signal.4. The receiver ordinarily performs the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal.5. The destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended.

Designer

Shannon, Claude

Date

1948

Source

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

Bibliographic Citation

Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. 1964. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. The University of Illinois Press. Figure 1. Pages 33-35 (and 7-8). 

Shannon, C.E. 1948. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.

depict things of type

Sequence or Process

is composed of

Square

has attribute

Arrow

Solid Line

Coverage

communication

cybernetics