Introduction to Information Technology

Data
Data is the plural of Datum. Raw data are numbers, characters, images or other outputs from devices to convert physical quantities into symbols, in a very broad sense. Examples of Data are weight, cost, price, populations, etc.

Information
Information is a quality of a message that is sent from a sender to one or more receivers. Information is always about something (size of a parameter, occurrence of an event ...). Viewed in this manner, information does not have to be accurate. It may be a truth or a lie, or just the sound of a kiss. Even a disruptive noise used to inhibit the flow of communication and create misunderstanding would in this view be a form of information. However, generally speaking, the amount of information in the received message increases the more accurate the message is. Information is not data The words, information and data, are used interchangeably in many contexts. This may lead to their confusion. However, they are not synonyms. Often data is defined as raw facts while information is processed data. Another distinction that is made is that information is the things that we know and data is the representation of the information. As an example, we may be thinking about a favorite niece's age, who is four. We would tend to represent that with Arabic numerals (4), but we could represent it using Roman numerals (IV), tick marks (||||), or any other way we agree on. The information has not changed in each case, although the data has. Note that we tend to think of information in terms of declarative knowledge. That is, the facts we know such as a temperature, an age, etc. Information can also be skills and things we know how to do, which is called procedural knowledge.

Data Input
Data and instructions entered into a computer for processing purposes are Data Input. In this phase, the initial data or input data is prepared in some convenient form for processing. Input format depends upon the requirements of Input device and requirement of the end user. All inputs must be recorded in some computer readable form as per the requirement.

Output
The Information generated as a result of processing by a system. Once data are processed, the results are to be brought out in the most suitable form for the user. This is called the output cycle. Outputs can be stored for future reference and can also be communicated among users.

Processing
A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions known as a program. In this phase the input data is processed and usually combined with other data to produce information in a more useful form. This phase includes the development by programmer.

What is Computer?

A computer is an electronic machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions known as a program. Computers are extremely versatile. In fact, they are universal information-processing machines. Computers take numerous physical forms. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, while entire modern embedded computers may be smaller than a deck of playing cards.

History of Computing
Originally, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations, often with the aid of a mechanical calculating device or analog computer. Examples of these early devices, the ancestors of the computer, included the abacus and the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek device for calculating the movements of planets which dates from about 87 BC.[1] The end of the Middle Ages saw a reinvigoration of European mathematics and engineering, and Wilhelm Schickard's 1623 device was the first of a number of mechanical calculators constructed by European engineers.[2] In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard made an improvement to existing loom designs that used a series of punched paper cards as a program to weave intricate patterns. The resulting Jacquard loom is not considered a true computer but it was an important step in the development of modern digital computers. Charles Babbage was the first to conceptualize and design a fully programmable computer as early as 1820, but due to a combination of the limits of the technology of the time, limited finance, and an inability to resist tinkering with his design, the device was never actually constructed in his lifetime. By the end of the 19th century a number of technologies that would later prove useful in computing had appeared, such as the punch card and the vacuum tube, and large-scale automated data processing using punch cards was performed by tabulating machines designed by Hermann Hollerith. During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated special-purpose analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation. These became increasingly rare after the development of the programmable digital computer. A succession of steadily more powerful and flexible computing devices were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, gradually adding the key features of modern computers, such as the use of digital electronics (largely invented by Claude Shannon in 1937)[3] and more flexible programmability. Defining one point along this road as "the first digital electronic computer" is exceedingly difficult. On 12 May 1941 Konrad Zuse completed his electromechanical Z3, being the first working machine featuring automatic binary arithmetic and feasible programmability (therefore the first digital operational programmable computer, although not electronic); other notable achievements include the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (shown working around Summer 1941), a special-purpose machine that used valve-driven (vacuum tube) computation, binary numbers, and regenerative memory; the secret British Colossus computer (demonstrated in 1943), which had limited programmability but demonstrated that a device using thousands of valves could be both made reliable and reprogrammed electronically; the Harvard Mark I, a large-scale electromechanical computer with limited programmability (shown working around 1944); the decimal-based American ENIAC (1946) which was the first general purpose electronic computer, but originally had an inflexible architecture that meant reprogramming it essentially required it to be rewired.

Defining characteristics of five first operative digital computers Computer AtanasoffBerry Computer Zuse Z3 Colossus computer Harvard Mark I/IBM ASCC ENIAC Nation Year Digital Binary Electronic Programmable Turing complete No Yes No Yes Yes

USA Germany UK USA USA

193742 1941 1944 1944 1946

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes Yes Yes No No

Yes No Yes No Yes

No Fully, by paper tape Partially, by rewiring By paper tape Partially, rewiring by

The team who developed ENIAC, recognizing its flaws, came up with a far more flexible and elegant design, which has become known as the Von Neumann architecture (or "stored program architecture"). This stored program architecture became the basis for virtually all modern computers. A number of projects to develop computers based on the stored program architecture commenced in the mid to late-1940s; the first of these were completed in Britain. The first to be up and running was the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, but the EDSAC was perhaps the first practical version that was developed. Valve (tube) driven computer designs were in use throughout the 1950s, but were eventually replaced with transistor-based computers, which were smaller, faster, cheaper, and much more reliable, thus allowing them to be commercially produced, in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the adoption of integrated circuit technology had enabled computers to be produced at a low enough cost to allow individuals to own personal computers. How computers work: The stored program architecture While the technologies used in computers have changed dramatically since the first electronic, general-purpose computers of the 1940s, most still use the stored program architecture (sometimes called the von Neumann architecture). The design made the universal computer a practical reality. The architecture describes a computer with four main sections: the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), the control circuitry, the memory, and the input and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are interconnected by bundles of wires (called "buses" when the same bundle supports more than one data path) and are usually driven by a timer or clock (although other events could drive the control circuitry). Conceptually, a computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells. Each cell has a numbered "address" and can store a small, fixed amount of information. This information can either be an instruction, telling the computer what to do, or data, the information which the computer is to process using the instructions that have been placed in the memory. In principle, any cell can be used to store either instructions or data. The ALU is in many senses the heart of the computer. It is capable of performing two classes of basic operations. The first is arithmetic operations; for instance, adding or subtracting two numbers together. The set of arithmetic operations may be very limited; indeed, some designs do not directly support multiplication and division operations (instead, users support multiplication and division through programs that perform multiple additions, subtractions, and

other digit manipulations). The second class of ALU operations involves comparison operations: given two numbers, determining if they are equal, or if not equal which is larger. The I/O systems are the means by which the computer receives information from the outside world, and reports its results back to that world. On a typical personal computer, input devices include objects like the keyboard and mouse, and output devices include computer monitors, printers and the like, but as will be discussed later a huge variety of devices can be connected to a computer and serve as I/O devices. The control system ties this all together. Its job is to read instructions and data from memory or the I/O devices, decode the instructions, providing the ALU with the correct inputs according to the instructions, "tell" the ALU what operation to perform on those inputs, and send the results back to the memory or to the I/O devices. One key component of the control system is a counter that keeps track of what the address of the current instruction is; typically, this is incremented each time an instruction is executed, unless the instruction itself indicates that the next instruction should be at some other location (allowing the computer to repeatedly execute the same instructions). Since the 1980s the ALU and control unit (collectively called a central processing unit or CPU) have typically been located on a single integrated circuit called a microprocessor. The functioning of such a computer is in principle quite straightforward. Typically, on each clock cycle, the computer fetches instructions and data from its memory. The instructions are executed, the results are stored, and the next instruction is fetched. This procedure repeats until a halt instruction is encountered. The set of instructions interpreted by the control unit, and executed by the ALU, are limited in number, precisely defined, and very simple operations. Broadly, they fit into one or more of four categories: 1) moving data from one location to another (an example might be an instruction that "tells" the CPU to "copy the contents of memory cell 5 and place the copy in cell 10"). 2) executing arithmetic and logical processes on data (for instance, "add the contents of cell 7 to the contents of cell 13 and place the result in cell 20"). 3) testing the condition of data ("if the contents of cell 999 are 0, the next instruction is at cell 30"). 4) altering the sequence of operations (the previous example alters the sequence of operations, but instructions such as "the next instruction is at cell 100" are also standard). Instructions, like data, are represented within the computer as binary code a base two system of counting. For example, the code for one kind of "copy" operation in the Intel x86 line of microprocessors is 10110000 [4]. The particular instruction set that a specific computer supports is known as that computer's machine language. Using an already-popular machine language makes it much easier to run existing software on a new machine; consequently, in markets where commercial software availability is important suppliers have converged on one or a very small number of distinct machine languages. More powerful computers such as minicomputers, mainframe computers and servers may differ from the model above by dividing their work between more than one main CPU. Multiprocessor and multicore personal and laptop computers are also beginning to become available.[5][6] Supercomputers often have highly unusual architectures significantly different from the basic stored-program architecture, sometimes featuring thousands of CPUs, but such designs tend to be useful only for specialized tasks. At the other end of the size scale, some microcontrollers use the Harvard architecture that ensures that program and data memory are logically separate.

Programs Computer programs are simply lists of instructions for the computer to execute. These can range from just a few instructions which perform a simple task, to a much more complex instruction list which may also include tables of data. Many computer programs contain millions of instructions, and many of those instructions are executed repeatedly. A typical modern PC (in the year 2005) can execute around 3 billion instructions per second. Computers do not gain their extraordinary capabilities through the ability to execute complex instructions. Rather, they do millions of simple instructions arranged by people known as programmers. In practice, people do not normally write the instructions for computers directly in machine language. Such programming is time-consuming and error-prone, making programmers less productive. Instead, programmers describe the desired actions in a "high level" programming language which is then translated into the machine language automatically by special computer programs (interpreters and compilers). Some programming languages map very closely to the machine language, such as Assembly Language (low level languages); at the other end, languages like Prolog are based on abstract principles far removed from the details of the machine's actual operation (high level languages). The language chosen for a particular task depends on the nature of the task, the skill set of the programmers, tool availability and, often, the requirements of the customers (for instance, projects for the US military were often required to be in the Ada programming language). Computer software is an alternative term for computer programs; it is a more inclusive phrase and includes all the ancillary material accompanying the program needed to do useful tasks. For instance, a video game includes not only the program itself, but also data representing the pictures, sounds, and other material needed to create the virtual environment of the game. A computer application is a piece of computer software provided to many computer users, often in a retail environment. The stereotypical modern example of an application is perhaps the office suite, a set of interrelated programs for performing common office tasks. Going from the extremely simple capabilities of a single machine language instruction to the myriad capabilities of application programs means that many computer programs are extremely large and complex. A typical example is Windows XP, created from roughly 40 million lines of computer code in the C++ programming language;[9] there are many projects of even bigger scope, built by large teams of programmers. The management of this enormous complexity is key to making such projects possible; programming languages, and programming practices, enable the task to be divided into smaller and smaller subtasks until they come within the capabilities of a single programmer in a reasonable period. Nevertheless, the process of developing software remains slow, unpredictable, and errorprone; the discipline of software engineering has attempted, with some success, to make the process quicker and more productive and improve the quality of the end product. A problem or a model is computational if it is formalized in such way that can be transformed to the form of a computer program. Computationally is the serious research problem of humanistic, social and psychological sciences, for example, modern systemic, cognitive and socio-cognitive [10] approaches develop different attempts to the computational specification of their "soft" knowledge.