Claude Shannon's Approach to Information Theory

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer. He thought through things by solving puzzles, by building gadgets with his hands. When he worked on this information theory paper, of roughly a decade behind closed doors in his apartment, when he unveiled what he had been working on, his boss at Bell Labs said, it exploded onto the scene like a bomb. No one saw it coming. We'd be living in long before there's anything like a modern computer or like a modern internet. But why do you speak to that initial novel idea of taking information, reducing it to bits and getting around this error problem? I think what Shannon brought to the problem, that a lot of people were working on.

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