A bit became a bit in the 1930s and 1940s. In medieval England it had been a bite-sized morsel. In the young US, it amounted to an eighth of a Spanish silver dollar, and one could allegedly get a shave and a haircut for two bits. Then, in 1936, the distinguished American inventor Vannevar Bush, the lead founder of the early technology start-up Raytheon and head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, wrote a fascinating and quite amusing article reviewing the truly amazing mechanical and electrical devices that were being used at the time for all kinds of computing tasks, including differentiation, integration, correlation analysis, the solving of systems of algebraic and differential equations, the evaluation of wind tunnel experiments, and the analysis of numerous other diverse applications. While affirming that, “the combination of such machines with punched cards has made arithmetic into an entirely new affair,” Bush lamented the size limitations of the cards and proposed that clever coding could increase their capacity to “over 300,000 bits of information.” About a decade later, the famous Bell Labs mathematician and statistician John Tukey, and the pioneer of information theory, Claude Shannon, formalized Bush's casual terminology by contracting binary and digit to describe a base unit of information as one bit, a flip-flop that could only take the values of 1 or 0, on or off.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and there is no doubt that the little bit has conquered almost every bit of the world, and it is hard to think of any aspect of life that is not fundamentally affected by digitization. Building upon the visionary ideas of the nineteenth-century British inventor, engineer, mathematician, and philosopher Charles Babbage, who originated the concept of a programmable computer, ever-more sophisticated, powerful, and fast computers came to be, leading to today's huge supercomputers but, maybe more importantly, to huge numbers of very small computers that, in their own ways, are all supposed to make life simpler. Not surprisingly, computers have also become premier tools of systems biologists.

The most recognized and obvious help we get from computers is the handling of data. And whether it is the government, Walmart or systems biology, the amounts of some data have become so enormous that they are rightfully classified as BigData.