to do when writing a new piece of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams what modern humans are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to say, the same thing under a different name. All that you see on your computer screen—your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and word-processing documents written in thirty-seven different typefaces—is still, from the computer’s point of view, just like telegrams, except much longer and demanding of more arithmetic.
The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web browser, visit a site on the Net, and then select the View/Document Source menu item. You will get a bunch of computer code that looks something like this:
C R Y P T O N O M I C O N
The quickest way to get a taste of this is to fire up your web browser, visit a site on the Net, and then select the View/Document Source menu item. You will get a bunch of computer code that looks something like this:
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