Claude Shannon did his master's thesis in 1939. It was on how to build a working digital computer - none had ever been built before.
Claude Shannon, in the 1950's, used the term "
information" to describe the statistical properties of data transmitted from one place to another. He was working for the telephone company AT&T at Bell Labs in order to improve the quality of phone calls. He founded the modern field of (statistical) information - he was not overly concerned with the meaning of the "
data" that he called "
information".
Previously, the term "
information" was used as the verb "
to inform". That is, one is "
informed" that such and such is true - what we now call "
information".
Matthew 5:37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. [kjv]
John Tukey (American mathematician and statistician) , working with John von Neumann, coined the term "bit" as "binary digit". The classical "bit" has one of two values, which can be represented as 0 (usually taken as false) and 1 (usually taken as true).
