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Wednesday, January 26, 2011

A Short History of Information Technology

Do yOu KnOw tHe HiStOrY oF iNfOrMaTiOn TeChNoLoGy???


The Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age

We might not have thought of it as "information technology" several thousand years ago when we as a species were painting animals on cave walls. But in fact that may be exactly what it was.

Using a combination of tools that included manganese "crayons" and clay that was colored with various pigments, early humans left these images on the walls of a cave near Lascaux, France and on cliffs in the Algerian Sahara.

These have been dated as being approximately 18,000 and 8,000 years old respectively. Unfortunately, there is no way to be certain exactly what message was being communicated (a problem our own descendants 15,000 years from now may very well encounter from what we leave behind!)

Since the images depict animals that were commonly hunted at the time, and given the importance of game animals to a hunting-gathering culture, it's possible that such images were attempts to present information about such game, or part of a rite designed to ensure a successful hunt.

The invention of writing systems - including pictograms such as hieroglyphics, alphabetic writing and "syllabic" systems - seems to have taken place almost at the same time as the development of agriculture. Agriculture introduced such formerly unknown concepts as land ownership, advanced trade and the accumulation of wealth, which in turn led to more complex societal structures.

As you might expect, this necessitated more detailed and efficient record-keeping. Alphabetic writing has a substantial advantage over pictograms (hieroglyphs), because a relatively limited number of symbols (letters) can be used over and over in infinite combination to communicate nearly anything. (As you will see later, modern I.T. uses only two of these symbols!)

Preserving and storing such information posed certain challenges; information either had to be inscribed on stone or clay tablets (which were heavy) or animal skins, wax tablets or papyrus (which weren't durable).

The Hellenistic World

The Classical Greeks were the first people of record to attempt to find scientific, rational explanations for natural phenomena. Some of the earliest proto-computers known were mechanical devices developed by the Greeks. One of these was a form of abacus (which also developed and was used in ancient China). The device facilitated and simplified mathematical calculation.

Consider REALLY early Greco-Roman Abacus

Another early computational device was the antikthera, greek in origin. An antikthera was discovered by a Greek sponge diver over a century ago, it was only recently that this 2100-year-old device was reconstructed and shown to be an early form of computer designed to chart the movements of the sun, moon and five planets known at the time.

Early Programmable Devices

By the time the gradual break-up and fall of the Roman Empire was complete in the year 476 C.E., scientific and technological advances in the Western world had ground to a halt. While much of the scientific knowledge of the Greeks was preserved by Irish monks and Arab scholars, it wasn't until the fourteenth century that principles of engineering were rediscovered and applied to information. The first of these was of course the printing press.

Although the concept of movable type printing had been developed in China some four hundred years earlier, it was Gutenberg's device in 1447 that revolutionized communications, making it easier and faster to record and disseminate information than ever before. The first truly programmable device would not come along for another 354 years, however.

The Jacquard Loom of 1801 was a product of the Industrial Revolution. This invention used a series of specially punched paper cards that functional as templates, allowing for the automatic weaving of highly intricate patterns. Those punch cards became very significant to computing in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.

The next development was Charles Babbage's "Analytical Machine" - a fully-programmable computer that unfortunately was never actually built. Babbage worked on designs from 1837 until his passing in 1871. This steam-powered mechanism would have also utilized punch cards, with a central processing unit (CPU) and a form of memory storage in the form of a system of pegs inserted into rotating barrels.

The Analytical Machine would have been capable of storing 1,000 numbers of up to fifty digits each, and perform six different mathematical operations, including the calculation of square roots. Babbage's ideas were incorporated into early electronic computing devices being developed in the late 1930's and 1940's, although not all of these were actually programmable.

The first truly programmable computers - able to store and use information - did not come into common use until the 1950's, and yes - made use of punch cards (those born before 1965 may remember playing with them).

Of course most people born in the 70's, 80's and 90's just take for granted that the Information Technology we have today is from fairley recent developments in science, mechanics and electronics. But we know different now don't we. And therefore can better appreciate what we have available to us now...

Friday, January 21, 2011

CHAPTER 2: The Internet, The Web and Electric Commerce

Internet is referred as Information Superhighway because it connects million of people across the globe. Internet was launched in 1969. The Internet is named after the Internet Protocol, the standard communications protocol used by every computer on the Internet. The Internet can powerfully leverage your ability to find, manage, and share information. Never before in human history has such a valuable resource been available to so many people at such little cost. The Web provides an easy to use, intuitive interface to connect to the Internet and is used by millions of people everyday. Internet uses commonly for communicating, online shopping, searching, entertainment, education and so on. 



How does the Internet work? The Internet workings include a technical design and a management structure. The management structure consists of a generally democratic collection of loosely-coupled organizations and working groups with mostly non-overlapping responsibilities. The technical design is founded on a complex, interlocking set of hierarchical tree-like structures, like Internet Protocol addresses and domain names, mixed with networked structures like packet switching and routing protocols, all tied together with millions of lines of sophisticated software that continues to get better all the time. So far this combination of management and technical structures has worked well, providing the reliable, powerful communication platform on which the rest of the complexity of the Internet is built.







A web browser  is a  software application  for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.  An information resource is identified by a URLs and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by Web servers in private networks  or files in file systems. Some browsers can also be used to save information resources to file systems. The primary purpose of a web browsers allow the user. All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.








Often referred to as simply e-commerce the phrase is used to describe business that is conducted over the Internet using any of the applications that rely on the Internet, such as e-mail, instant messaging, shopping carts, web services and among others. Electronic commerce can be between two businesses transmitting funds, goods, services and data or between a business and a customer.


Saturday, January 15, 2011

CHAPTER 1: INFORMTION TECHNOLOGY, THE INTERNET AND YOU

HISTORY: The backstory of information technology precedes the invention of the computer. The abacus, used by Asians, Egyptians, Romans, and the Greek can be termed a source of information technology. Calculators, the first mechanical one built by German polymath Wilhelm Schickard, or the slide rule, developed in 1622 by William Oughtred, also comes under the heading of information technology. Another example would be punch card machines, expanded upon by IBM in the early to mid 1900's, qualifies the term information technology.

DEFINITION: Information technology basically refers to the employment of computer hardware and software applications to manage data. Departments, such as Management Information Services (MIS), handle the responsibility for the storage, protection, processing, transmission and retrieval of the information as required.

INFORMATION SYSTEM CONCEPT is the system that use the resources of people, hardware, sofstware, data, and network to perform input, processing, output, storage, and control activities that convert data resources into information product.

EXAMPLE OF HARDWARE:




why information system are important??
important for manager and other business knowledge workers in todays global information society.