In this very general form, you can find it even earlier; atomism has always been popular, and so was the program of looking for simple causes and other reductionist approaches. On the other hand, I do not know how the notion of information has developed through time. I think Berkeley was the first to use it in a modern sense; it is natural development of the theory of knowledge. If the latter is a relation between the ideas about perceivable objects then you are driven towards considering the sum total of such relations as information. One needs to abandon the theory of the ideal forms entirely to come with this concept. Descartes (innate ideas) and Bacon (a search for truth about Divine omnipotence via discovery of simple causes) do not do that, so I do not think they can be regarded as the ones developing the notion of information. I think it is Locke, but I confess that I have never seen making such a connection explicitly by the scholars. All accounts I've seen placed the "information" (as a philosophical concept) in the mouth of Pierce. Yet all he did was tying this already made-up concept to his logic. The notion that knowledge is relations between the elements (like ideas) that can be categorized and listed and that such lists represent the essence of the object one knows (= information about it) is Locke. Of course, one can find some of this approach even in Aristotle. I think the change is around 1700 rather than 1600, and it is not the resurrection of atomism or reductionism but rather new epistemiology.