What is data?

Data (plural of datum) are just information, not physical entities. The media with which we use to distribute data could have some physical form (paper, phone lines, WWW, whatever).

Data is simply unorganized information. Data can be written in a notebook or it can be stored on a hard drive. If you were to take a phone book and tear off the spine (HULK style) and toss all the pages up in the air and collect them in a new stack you would have data. All the names and numbers are still there but it's now longer organized in a useful manner.

If you are talking about computer systems well data is stored on hard disks magnetically. As the the read/write head moves over the disk an electronic charge gives a spot on the dist a north magnetic alignment, or a south magnetic alignment. To the computer it reads it as 1's and 0's But if you star reading directly from the disk all you would get is a series of 1's and 0's that you couldn't make heads or tales from. That's why they call it data in a computer system. It can also be sored electronically, when you open a document the data is copied from the hard drive where it was stored magnetically and copied to the RAM where it is stored electronically. Ram works by opening and closing tiny electronic switches. Either the switch is open a 1 or it is closed a 0. Now on cd's and dvd the data is represented as little tiny bubbles on the disk. At the time the disk is made it burns little tiny bubbles into the disk you can't see them they are two small but they are there. When the disk is read from is scans a laser bean onto the disk, if there is a bubble there , the light is not reflected back that would be a 0, if there is a bubble there the light is not reflected back and it's a 1.

~D

Data is simply information without a meaning. For example, you are given a piece of paper with 6 digits on it. This could relate to anything. A date, someones birthday, or a security code to a vault. This piece of paper is data to you, but information to the people who knows what the digits are representing.

Data in computer lingo means "bits". 8 bits make up one byte. A byte can store one character e.g. "a" or "3" or "."

Or taking it simple: Data is unprocessed information!

(Singular)...Datum is a piece of information.

(Plural)......Data is a number of pieces of information.

Spoken, written, stored data.

....And an Android in Startrek...