Information Technology
Information technology, or IT, refers to the use of computers to store, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data. Unlike personal or recreational technology, IT is often used in the context of business operations. Information technology is classified as a subset of communications and information technology (ICT). An information technology system, or IT system for short, is a communications system, an information system, or, more specifically, a computer system with all of its peripheral devices, software, and hardware that is utilized by a small group of people.
Since the Sumerians of Mesopotamia started writing in 3000 BC, people have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating data. However, the word information technology in its current definition was first used in a 1958 Harvard Business Review article by Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler, who wrote that “the new technology does not yet have a single established name.” It will be known as information technology (IT). Their concept includes three components: processing methods, applying mathematical and statistical techniques to decision-making, and using computer programs to emulate higher-order thinking.
Although computers and computer networks are often included in the term, it also relates to other information transmission technologies such as television and telephone. Information technology is related to a variety of commodities and services in an economy, including telecom equipment, computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, the internet, and e-commerce.
Four major stages of IT development may be distinguished based on the technology employed to process and store information: pre-mechanical (3000 BC – 1450 AD), mechanical (1450-1840), electromechanical (1840-1940), and electronic (1940-present). This article (electronic) discusses the most recent period.
Data processing using electronics
Data repository
Punch tape, an ancient technology employed by early electronic computers such as Colossus, was a lengthy strip of paper with holes for representing data. During World War II, a kind of delay line memory called the mercury delay line was developed to remove clutter from radar signals. Current computers use delay line memory to store electrical data. The Williams tube, which was modeled like a standard cathode ray tube, was the first random-access digital storage device. However, the data it carried and the delay line memory it used were volatile, necessitating regular refreshing and vanishing when the power was turned off. The magnetic drum, invented in 1932 and utilized in the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, was the first kind of nonvolatile computer storage.
IBM introduced the hard disk drive in 1956 as part of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Currently, the bulk of digital data is stored either optically on media such as CD-ROMs or magnetically on hard drives. The bulk of data was stored on analogue devices until 2002, when digital storage capacity overtook analogue for the first time. Approximately 94% of data stored worldwide in 2007 was digital, with 52% on hard drives, 28% on optical storage, and 1% on digital magnetic tape. Globally, electronic device storage capacity is predicted to quadruple every three years, from less than three exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes by 2007.
Databases: In order to address the difficulty of accurately and quickly storing and retrieving large amounts of data, Database Management Systems (DMS) were created in the 1960s. IBM’s Information Management System (IMS) was among the earliest of these systems, and it is still widely used today, more than 50 years later. Although Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model in the 1970s based on set theory, predicate logic, and the well-known concepts of tables, rows, and columns, IMS stores data in a hierarchical structure. Oracle released its first relational database management system (RDBMS) for sale in 1981.
Every DMS is made up of components that work together to allow several users to examine the same data simultaneously without jeopardizing its integrity. One thing that all databases have in common is that a database schema holds the definition and organization of the data structure in addition to the actual data.
In recent years, the extensible markup language, or XML, has become popular as a data representation format. Although XML data may be stored in ordinary file systems, relational databases are often utilized to store it due to its “robust implementation confirmed by years of both theoretical and practical work.” The text-based structure of XML, a derivative of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), has the advantage of being machine and human readable.
Data Extraction
Based on relational algebra, the relational database idea gave rise to Structured Query Language (SQL), an independent computer language.
“Data” and “information” are not interchangeable terms. All data is just data unless it is organized and presented in a logical manner. Even inside a single firm, the vast majority of digital data globally is unstructured and stored in a variety of physical formats. Data warehouses were initially developed in the 1980s to help unify these disparate sources. Typically, they include information obtained from a variety of sources, including external resources such as the Internet, and organized to allow decision support systems (DSS).
Data Transfer
Data transmission consists of three components: propagation, transmission, and reception. It may be classed as either telecommunications, which has bidirectional upstream and downstream channels, or broadcasting, which sends information downstream in a unidirectional fashion.
Since the early 2000s, XML has been increasingly utilized to communicate data, particularly for machine-oriented interactions and web-based protocols such as SOAP, which represent “data-in-transit rather than… data-at-rest.”
Data processing
Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential rate of technological progress, a version on Moore’s law, as follows: Between 1986 and 2007, global telecommunications capacity doubled every 34 months, global storage capacity doubled every three years, machine application-specific computing capacity roughly doubled every 14 months, and global general-purpose computer capacity doubled every 18 months. Every 12.3 years, the amount of broadcast information per capita doubles.
Every day, massive amounts of data are stored all across the world, but unless properly analyzed and presented, they essentially dwell in what have been nicknamed “data tombs”—that is, “data vaults that are hardly accessed.” The field of data mining, described as “the process of identifying intriguing patterns and information from enormous volumes of data,” was established in the late 1980s to address this issue.