Data
Tags: computerscience, beginners
Published: 2022-01-05 04:49:45

Data in computer science and basic underlying architecture for data in computer science

The term Data, has been used in all places; it has multiple meanings depending upon context. In general, Data refers to a symbol such as a number, word, or text. These data are collectively together, known as “Information”, that always carry a logical meaning.

So data is created or generated by some source object, like a living object or non-living object, ex: Light by the sun, sound by humans, etc. Then the data has been transmitted by some medium like as wired, wireless. Finally, it reached some object, if that object interpret received data in correct way then it could capture information.

Ok, we don’t want to get into the deep in chemistry, physics of source object elements. We are just going to understand data in computer science.

Initially, some devices were invented only to process data mechanically. That is, device receives some data from some physical/mechanical source and transformed into meaningful or manipulated data, then result also displayed in some physical format. So these devices won’t store data initially.

Until the development of the first generation computers based on vacuum tubes, there had been several developments in the computing technology related to the mechanical computing devices. The key developments that took place till the first computer was developed are as follows

- Calculating Machine — ABACUS First mechanical calculating device
- Napier Bones — a mechanical device
- Slide Rule — a mechanical analog computer
- Pascal’s adding and subtraction machine — a mechanical device
- Leibniz’s Multiplication and Dividing Machine — also a mechanical device

After all of above, the first data processing(analytic) device was invented, that is, Punch card System. It is a physical card. This is the first invention for storing data. These card used as input and output for the system. The concept of punch cards is very simple, it uses hole to represent data.

> One thing we should know, humans can’t do anything beyond nature. We already know that data is a symbol; a sequence of symbols is called information. Humans invented billions of symbols(numbers, language, images) to represent data. We all can understand these by seeing it through the eyes and hearing. But the problem with this is, these all are very raw physical forms; effort and cost for portability, mobility, and replication of data is relatively larger. After a long time humans have identified some pattern which is naturally available in multiple forms.

> The pattern is, a sequence of very minimal symbols. First, we need to understand one thing; we can’t do anything with one symbol, because we can’t interpret information from that, but we can interpret information from multiple symbols in sequence. So we can use very minimal two symbol representations of data. but if we use multiple symbols, I mean more than two, then that is not feasible by nature in multiple forms (like light, frequency, magnetic field, on and off state.) If we use just two symbol we can able to form and represent data and able to interpret information in multiple form by natural like light (light is either on or off), frequency(high frequency or low frequency), magnetic field (magnetized either positive or negative), electric state (electron present or not present), digital number (0 or 1), Boolean (True or False)

In the first physical storage device (punch card), two symbols (two state systems) are used to represent data.
- with hole
- without hole

So with just two symbols we can just get two meanings, but how will we represent billions of symbols that we were using in our normal life.

Even I have the same doubt, but I realized we do represent billions of symbol data with just two different symbols(state). But we need a sequence of symbol.

I will explain with our number system, which will demonstrate this in details, we have 10 symbols in our number system and we call them as below.
- 0 — zero
- 1 — one
- 2 — two
- 3 — three
- 4 — four
- 5 — five
- 6 — six
- 7 — seven
- 8 — eight
- 9 — nine

With these 10 symbols we can represent an infinity of unique information by adding new digits. like as 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, …., 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999……. Here we can clearly see that when we want to represent more unique information we want to add more digit sequences to the symbol. Likewise, if we use two symbols then we can even represent infinite unique information, but here a digit sequence more than our number system to represent the same value.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xckgt5ccsveitkgg75y2.png)

> In Punch card consider hole as symbol 1 and without hole as symbol 0 as 2 symbol representation. Punch cards follow some standard sequence(data units) and digits to represent data. But using a punch card, we can’t store large information because of the limitations with a physical card.

Do you know why two symbol data representation is more popular than ten symbol representation in digital world(computer science). Because it overcomes all the barriers in normal representation and is compatible with nature and very easy to represent data in both analog and digital. like We can easily replicate symbol and transform symbol from one to another like light symbol representation to magnetic representation and then frequency representation then back forth representation. So these two symbol representations changed this world like that we never dreamt of in 1900. With implementation and innovation in chemistry, physics, mathematics leads lot of progression in the digital industry.

Mechanical and physical devices have limitations on processing data, so that we can’t extend those device features after reaching some point in development and data storage. So we need a new model to process data. We first invented vacuum-tube computer, this is called as first generation computer, this is not a mechanical device, this is the first circuit based electronic computer, which represent the data, this is good improvement from mechanical to electronic computer, the problem with this is failure of vacuum tubes, issue with maintenance and we can’t store data for long time(non-persistent), following vacuum-tube computer next biggest invention happens, that is Transistor. This invention totally changed computer science from processing data (non-persistent storage, like RAM) to storing data (persistent storage like ROM); these led to new technologies like memory and storage. We can learn these in deep in the next article.

Data in computer science is information processed or stored by a computer using two symbol (two state) representation.

The sequence/stream of symbol is called as data unit. Single unit is called as Bit, which can only store 2 possible symbol values (either 0 or 1). These symbols in computer science called as Binary or Binary number system.