There was a Greek philosopher named Thales of Miletus who, after observing the world around him, stated: "All is water."

And there was a technology leader (me) observing the information technology industry and stating: "All is Data."

To outsiders, the software industry seems very complex, engaging in complex missions and often, they truly are complex missions. But we can summarize that all software is about data:

  • They collect data.
  • They transport data.
  • They sometimes transform data from one type to another.
  • They store and save data.
  • They protect the data.
  • They search through data.
  • They translate data into "wisdom."
  • And they present data.

We'll touch on the "how" in later chapters.

Data and its importance to humans go back much earlier than the first computer inventions. We have findings of Mesopotamian tax records from 3,300–2,000 B.C. stored on clay tablets, apparently, government taxes are just as ancient. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

In fact, data is so fundamental to living beings that it's part of our physiology: DNA is where we store all the genetic information of an organism, and our brain is where we store and process data.

Software and computers are just answering that need, especially as the amount of data to store and process grew beyond humans' ability to handle it, and as the need arose for a faster way to transport data than human messengers running miles to deliver a message.

So, what is data?

Data is any piece of information, whether it's raining outside, your credit card details, your bills, the names of your friends, and so on.

Compared to the human brain, which collects and stores (for the short or long term) any data it can gather from the outside world, usually through the eyes, ears, taste, or touch, with software systems we can control what data is of interest to us, and whether we want to save it or not. I'll expand on this in later chapters.

Now that we've established that all software systems are about data, we can start to talk about the how, and first, about computers.