“Bring Minds Together – Bridge the Gap”

Module One - Introduction to Information Technology

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AGENDA
• Information and Information Technology

• Information/Knowledge Cycle
• Evolution of Information Technology
• Module level summary

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WHAT IS INFORMATION? INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY?

Information

1. Knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance

2. The attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative
sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary
digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects

Information Technology

The technology involving the development, maintenance, and use of computer systems,
software, and networks for the processing and distribution of data

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 Information/Knowledge Cycle
• Create – The process of creating information
• Store – The process of storing information in various
mediums
• Use – How we use information Information
(Knowledge)
• Share – Sharing information at the group,
organization, nationwide, and international levels
• Archive – The process of archiving information that is
not actively used based on an organization’s policy
• Destroy (Transform) – The process of destroying or
The 9 modules of this
transforming information. course cover this cycle

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 Information is Knowledge
• Types of knowledge
• Explicit knowledge - knowledge (knowing-that):
knowledge codified and digitized in books,
documents, reports, memos, etc. Documented
information that can facilitate action. Knowledge
what is easily identified, articulated, shared and
employed.
• Tacit knowledge – (knowing-how): knowledge
embedded in the human mind through experience
and jobs. Know-how and learning embedded within
the minds of people. Personal wisdom and
experience, context-specific, more difficult to extract
and codify. Tacit knowledge Includes insights,
intuitions

Read the Harvard Business Review article “The Knowledge Creating

Company” from the Reading section of this Module

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 Evolution of Information Technology

Prehistory History

Medieval Contemporary
Paleolithic Neolithic Ancient Age Modern Age Age
Age
3 Millions
10000 BC 3000 BC – 476 AC 476 – 1492 AC 1492 – 1789 AC 1789 – 2020 AC
10000BC

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 Module One

F O U N D AT I O N S O F
I N F O R M AT I O N T E C H N O LO GY

M G U - TA S FA - E D S I - I T- 1 0 1

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Ancient Age (3000 BC) - Symbols - The First Information Technology

Information
2. Rock Art Translated
to symbols
1. First fixed in the on clay and stone
human brain

3. Conversion of symbols
to letters 4. Writing
Writing had revealed one The first information
could use a set of symbols to technology created by
capture spoken language human beings

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19th Century Inventions – Taking Information Technology to the Next Level
1801 -1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard The first Hardware (The Jacquard Loom)
and the first Software (The Punch Card)
• The Loom - The most complex mechanism ever built by mankind
• Could be programmed to weave any kind of designs - The first hardware
• The creation of “Punch Card” was the Holy Grail’ of Programming!
• Any design could be translated in to punch cards and fed into the loom as
instructions (program)

This portrait was

woven using the
24,000 punch cards

24,000 Punch Cards = Jacquard’s Picture in a weave

Jacquard Punch Card symbols (a whole and blank space) could capture information
in any picture. This was considered to be the foundation of programming.

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19th Century Inventions for Managing and Transmitting Information

1822: English mathematician Charles Babbage produced a

steam-driven calculating machine that would be able to compute
tables of numbers.

1837 – Electric Telegraph (the Cooke and Wheatston

Telegraph) was in production (A point-to-point text messaging
system) – The Hardware

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19th Century Inventions for Managing and Transmitting Information (cont’d)

1840 Samuel Morse - Carrying/Transmitting Information through Electricity - Morse Code (the Software)

A revolutionary concept that allows

information to reside in electricity

Morse Code

Samuel Morse Uses long and short pulse of electrical currents

Frequently used letter got shorter code

Morse Code – Simple and Effective

to transmit information. Still used to date.

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 19th Century Inventions - James Clerk Maxwell (1865)

1865 James Clerk Maxwell: The Science of Thermodynamics

• James Clerk Maxwell, a

Scottish scientist in the field
of mathematical physics.
• He formulated the classical
theory of electromagnetic
radiation.
• Bringing together electricity,
Information about the motion of molecules that would help to magnetism, and light as
create order out of disorder (Oder out of chaos) different manifestations of
the same phenomenon.

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19th Century Inventions - 1890 Punch Cards in Commercial Business

• 1890: Herman Hollerith designs a punch card system to calculate the 1880 US census
• The work was accomplished in just three years saving the government $5 million.
• Hollerith and his associates established multiple companies under the name
‘Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company” (CTR).
• The name of the company later changed to IBM.

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 The 20th Century – The Foundation of Modern Information

Collaboration and research resulted in significant achievements in the field of

science and information technology
• Advances in Mathematics and Physics
• Findings of scholars and scientists published in academic papers
• Theories were formulated and tested
• Other disciplines also contributed to the enhancement of information technology

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 The 20th Century – The Foundation of IBM
• 1914 – Thomas J. Watson joined Computing-Tabulating-Recoding (CTR), became the GM,
and in 1924 changed CTR to the International Business Machines (IBM)

1924 2020

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 The 20th Century - 1936 – Alan Turing’s Seminal Paper as the Foundations
of Modern Computer

Cryptanalysis and Early Computers

During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime code-
breaking,
particularly that of German ciphers.
He worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station,
where he made five major advances in the field of cryptanalysis,
including specifying the bombe, an electromechanical
device used to help decipher German Enigma encrypted signals.

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 1936 - 1950 – The Computer was a Person

History of Black female mathematicians who • Turing’s foundations of mathematics

worked at the NASA space programs concept yield the understanding of certain
rules to be followed to compute numbers.
• Computers were originally human beings
using pencil and paper to do arithmetic
work.
• Banks, insurance companies, and
government agencies hired mostly females
to work behind the scenes to calculate
interest rates, weather predictions, and
calculations for space explorations.

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 1948 – Claude Shannon – A Mathematical Theory of Communication

The Foundations of Modern World Communication Network

Worked at Bell Lab

1. Discrete Noiseless Systems
2. The Discrete Channel with Noise
3. Continuous Information
4. The Continuous Channel
5. The Rate for a Continuous Source

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Shannon’s Contributions – The Bit
• Solved a major problem in the communication world – How to
measure Information
• Helped measure the amount and size of information within the
channel
• Gave information its own unit of measurement using Binary Digits
(Bit) (ones and zeros) – the smallest possible unit of information
(Bit). The fundamental item!
• 01001000010001001000001 | Punched or not Punched | On or Off |
Stop or Go |
• Transforming information into binary digits helps in managing,
measuring, and controlling information
• His invention is the foundation of Information Theory

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments
• 1937: J.V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University,
attempts to build the first computer without gears, belts or shafts.
• 1939: Hewlett-Packard is founded by David Packard and Bill Hewlett in a Palo Alto,
California, garage.
• 1941: Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, design a computer that can solve
29 equations simultaneously. This marks the first time a computer is able to store
information on its main memory.
• 1943 -1944: Two University of Pennsylvania professors, John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert, build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). Considered the
grandfather of digital computers, it filled a 20-foot by 40-foot room and had 18,000
vacuum tubes.
• 1946: Mauchly and Presper leave the University of Pennsylvania and receive funding from
the Census Bureau to build the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer for business and
government applications.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments
• 1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories invent
the transistor. They discovered how to make an electric switch with solid materials and no
need for a vacuum.
• 1953: Grace Hopper develops the first computer language, which eventually becomes
known as COBOL. Thomas Johnson Watson Jr., son of IBM CEO Thomas Johnson Watson
Sr., conceives the IBM 701 EDPM to help the United Nations keep tabs on Korea during the
war.
• 1954: The FORTRAN programming language, an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, is
developed by a team of programmers at IBM led by John Backus, according to the
University of Michigan.
• 1958: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce unveil the integrated circuit, known as the computer
chip. Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his work.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments

• 1964: Douglas Engelbart shows a prototype of the modern computer, with a mouse and a
graphical user interface (GUI).
• 1969: A group of developers at Bell Labs produce UNIX, an operating system that
addressed compatibility issues.
• 1970: The newly formed Intel unveils the Intel 1103, the first Dynamic Access Memory
(DRAM) chip.
• 1971: Alan Shugart leads a team of IBM engineers who invent the "floppy disk" allowing
data to be shared among computers.
• 1973: Robert Metcalfe, a member of the research staff for Xerox, develops Ethernet for
connecting multiple computers and other hardware.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments
• 1974-1977: A number of personal computers hit the market, including Scelbi & Mark-8
Altair, IBM 5100, Radio Shack's TRS-80 — affectionately known as the "Trash 80" — and the
Commodore PET.
• 1975: The January issue of Popular Electronics magazine features the Altair 8080,
described as the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models." Two
"computer geeks," Paul Allen and Bill Gates, offer to write software for the Altair using the
new BASIC language.
• 1975: (April 4) after the success of this first endeavor, the two childhood friends Gates and
Allen formed their own software company, Microsoft.
• 1976: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak start Apple Computers on April Fool's Day and roll
out the Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board.
• 1978: Accountants rejoice at the introduction of VisiCalc, the first computerized
spreadsheet program.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments
• 1979: Word processing becomes a reality as MicroPro International releases WordStar
• 1981: The first IBM personal computer, code-named "Acorn," is introduced. It uses
Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system. It has an Intel chip, two floppy disks and an optional
color monitor
• 1983: Apple's Lisa is the first personal computer with a GUI. It also features a drop-down
menu and icons
• 1985: The first dot-com domain name is registered on March 15, years before the World
Wide Web would mark the formal beginning of Internet history.
• 1985: Microsoft announces Windows
• 1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in
Geneva, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML), giving rise to the World Wide
Web.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 20th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments

• 1996: Sergey Brin and Larry Page develop the Google search engine at Stanford
University.
• 1997: Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, which was struggling at the time,
ending Apple's court case against Microsoft in which it alleged that Microsoft copied
the "look and feel" of its operating system.
• 1999: The term Wi-Fi becomes part of the computing language and users begin
connecting to the Internet without using wires.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 21th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments

• 2001: Apple unveils the Mac OS X operating system, which provides protected memory
architecture and pre-emptive multi-tasking, among other benefits. Not to be outdone,
Microsoft rolls out Windows XP, which has a significantly redesigned GUI.
• 2005: YouTube, a video sharing service, is founded. Google acquires Android, a Linux-
based mobile phone operating system.
• 2006: Apple introduces the MacBook Pro, its first Intel-based, dual-core mobile computer,
as well as an Intel-based iMac. Nintendo's Wii game console hits the market.
• 2007: The iPhone brings many computer functions to the smartphone.
• 2009: Microsoft launches Windows 7, which offers the ability to pin applications to the
taskbar and advances in touch and handwriting recognition, among other features.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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 21th Century – Other Inventions and Experiments

• 2010: Apple unveils the iPad, changing the way consumers view media and jumpstarting
the dormant tablet computer segment.
• 2011: Google releases the Chromebook, a laptop that runs the Google Chrome OS.
• 2012: Facebook gains 1 billion users on October 4.
• 2015: Apple releases the Apple Watch. Microsoft releases Windows 10.
• 2016: The first reprogrammable quantum computer was created. "Until now, there hasn't
been any quantum-computing platform that had the capability to program new algorithms
into their system.
• 2017: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a new
"Molecular Informatics" program that uses molecules as computers.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html

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Information and Mother Nature – We are not there yet

• Information is still being collected and

processed!
• Regardless of the major efforts human
beings have made since the early ages,
there is still a long way to go to
understand the mysteries of this world.
• DNA – The Holy Grail of Biology
• 3 billion bits of genetic code
(information) telling a human body how
to live and when to die. *

* Source: Washington Post, May, 2000

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 Just in Case our World Ceases to Exist – Information Continues
Knowledge should be Protected
• When Elon Musk, the founder of Space X,
launched the heavy rocket into space, not
only did he put his Tesla car on the rocket,
but he also put a 1-inch-wide (2.5
centimeters) quartz disc (with 360 terabytes
disc space) with Isaac Asimov's
"Foundation" trilogy encoded in laser-
etched gratings.
• The disc is expected to live 140 billion years
(longer than our current universe)
• In case something goes wrong on earth,
knowledge could be saved!

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 Module Summary
• The information was designed to give students a high–level summary of
• Basic characteristics of information are accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness,
and timeliness.
• Information technology is a business enabler. Improve performance, efficiency,
effectiveness.
• Technology also helps to speed up knowledge creation.
• The speed with which knowledge was created in the last 20 years was faster than the time it
took to create the entire knowledge in the last millennium.
• Information Quality – Garbage in Garbage Out. If we create bad information, regardless of
the media it resides on, the medium used to communicate it, or the policy designed to
preserve it, it is still bad.
• Focus on the quality of information.
• Technology will constantly change and evolve.

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