Information: Where It All Begins

Think of a photo you took today. An email you received. A song that's playing right now. A video you watched.

Completely different things, with completely different appearances and completely different meanings.

Inside a computer, they're all the same thing. But to understand that, we'll have to take a step back first:

What Is Information?

This one's easy, we don't need to get too philosophical. Information is nothing more than knowledge about something.

How many pets do you have? How many days until next year? Is the enemy approaching? Information is what separates "I know" from "I don't know."

Information Needs to Last

"How many pets do you have?" is a question about the present. Surely tomorrow you'll easily be able to know you still have the same number you had today, right? That information is stored in your head. But imagine you're heading to the grocery store and need to know what's missing at home. If it's just a few things, you might be able to remember them off the top of your head, but to make sure you don't forget anything, you'll definitely prefer having it written down somewhere over trusting your memory.

The need to store information has always existed:

• A merchant who sells goods on credit to several different customers - he needs to know who owes what, and how much. Without storing that information somehow, he depends exclusively on his memory, which fails, and on his customers' honesty, which can also fail.
• A king who needs to organize his army - he needs to know how many soldiers he has, where they're stationed.
• A farmer who needs to know how much he planted and how much he harvested....

So we can already conclude that information needs to live in some medium beyond our own heads, but more important still: it needs to be passed on.

In the king's example, an entire empire depends on that information being available not just to him, but to his generals, in distant places, weeks later. In the farmer's example, what happens when he's not around to remember? How will he pass the knowledge of the "art of farming" down to his son? How will the son pass it to the grandson? Without storing that information somehow, every generation starts from scratch.

Information has no weight, no color, takes up no space. It's something abstract. To exist beyond the present moment, it needs to be represented in something physical. You're reading this right now because someone, at some point, decided to store the information they knew. If I had only thought about this and never written it down, you would never have had access to this information.

What's the Most Important Kind of Information?

Before writing, before any sophisticated system, the most urgent question was always how many? How many sheep. How many soldiers. How many days. How much money.

Clearly this problem of storing/representing information isn't new. What's the oldest, rawest image that comes to mind when you think of "someone recording some quantity onto something physical"? For some curious reason, I think of the abacus, but I know that's not even close to the oldest way. A cave wall with marks, a floor with scratches...

Someone, thousands of years ago, took an abstract problem - how many - and turned it into something physical. How exactly does that work? What's the most basic, most primitive way of all to store/represent a quantity?

Before moving on

Can you answer: what is information, and why does it need to be represented in something physical?

If so, we're ready for the next step.