I was born in New York City, but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey. With fewer than a thousand residents, Alpine was too small to have its own secondary schools, so I attended junior high and high school in the town of Tenafly, three miles down the road.

Information processing has been defined as “the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer, a process that describes everything that happens in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system.” Human...