This is a big, important question. It’s big in that it’s incredibly open-ended. And it’s important in that it’s so fundamental, yet so simple in composition that it often gets overlooked.
Practically speaking, data are all of the things being recorded with technology. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invents what ultimately becomes the World Wide Web, which has since led to the creation of countless technologies that record and store data. Like what? Let’s keep moving to answer that...