"Information" is a term used universally in fields associated with computing technology. It is often loosely applied when no other term seems to be readily at hand; examples of this are terms such as "information technology," "information systems," and "information retrieval." It surprises most people when they discover that the term "information" actually has a very real meaning in an engineering context. It does not mean the same thing as "knowledge" or "data," but is instead intertwined with elements of communication systems theory.

When computing systems are connected together, it is necessary to consider how they might exchange data and work cooperatively. This introduces the notion that messages can be formulated by computing machines and be dispatched to other machines that receive them and then deal with their contents. All of the issues that are involved with these transmission and reception operations constitute what is known...