Encoding information

Information is all around us, be it sensor data, records kept by governments, or transactions made by banks. Devices need to be able to send and receive information, and most often they have to persist the information and store it on a disk, or any other storage medium.

For devices, systems or programs to communicate and store information, it has to be encoded in such a manner that it can be handled mechanically. For contemporary computer systems the universal encoding unit is the bit. The bit, or binary digit, can be represented on the level of hardware.

A bit is either a 1 or a 0. Mechanically and electronically this can be seen as on and off. Or, up and down.

Classic computers that were built using mechnical components such as s