Introduction To Information Management

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Information Technology is not Computer Science

ITM-1: Day 1

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IT is a very old concept

A wolf's jawbone more than 20,000 years old with

fifty-five notches in groups of five. This bone, which

was discovered in Czechoslovakia in 1937, is the first

evidence of the tally system.

Contrary to popular belief, Information Technology has been with us since the dawn

of civilization. Much of the practices are age old. First evidence of a system of counting and storing information dates back to more than 20,000 years old.

Society always had the need to collect, process and disseminate information. Information processing was always with us in the form of food availability, hidden

treasure, stories, rules for conduct, trading, religious rituals, plans of enemies or command of ruler. No civilization could survive without an elaborate information

system.

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Basic Information Technology

ProcessCollect Distribute

Security

Information is as much a commodity as like any other thing like coin, grains, drinks.

You do not get information just like that, there has to be a facility in place to collect information. Then one needs to make the information available to the right person,

at right time. This requires a facility for information dissemination.

At times, this may look paradoxical that unlike other commodity, information is not a

physical commodity. It is not a exchangeable product, if you share a piece of information both will have it. It is not goods, not even a form of energy, yet much of

the infrastructure for information technology depends on these physical processes. Information is a resource, that makes an action possible. Without information we

shall have chaos.

The fact that information is not an exchangeable commodity makes guarding the

information an important aspect of IT. In fact Genghis Khan, the father of modern organization, had used the business of Information Security as an strategic weapon.

He had a secret army wing – called “Arrow Rider”. Arrow riders provided covers for the messengers of Genghis Khan, at the same time, they used to intercept the

messengers of enemy, this made his enemies clueless about the movements of Genghis Khan and their own troops leading to utter chaos. Nothing much has

changed from the days of Arrow riders to present days of command aircrafts, the strategy still remains very much the same only technology has changed.

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IT processes

Input/

Output Process DecisionDocument

Prepare Manual Input Sum Or

CollateSort

Extract

Merge

Store

Data Delay Display

Basic process of IT remains much the same – as given in the flow chart symbols.

Namely:

•Input/Output

•Process

•Decide

•Document

•Prepare

•Manual input

•Summarize

•Collate

•Sort

•Share

•Extract

•Merge

•Store

•Wait

•And Display (disseminate)

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Computer : An IT tool

Napier's Bones [1600 AD]Abacus [1000 BC]Pascal's Arithmetic

Machine [1640]

Leibniz's Step

Reckoner [1671]

IBM Mark-I

[1942]IBM Blue Gene

[2007]

IT is not computer science. Although today its use is so encompassing that Information Technology Association of American defines IT as "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information, securely.

But actually, this is a very restrictive view of IT. As the architect of Toyota Production System puts it –an IT system can be much more advanced that use of computer. In fact the control exercised by KANBAN in Toyota factories was much more effective than computer based information systems in American Car factories. In fact it was so effective, that in early 80s American Car industry was in the verge of shut down by the competition of Japanese Car Manufacturers. Main strategic differentiators there was control (read information) that let the Japanese to control their inventories, address their quality problems much more efficiently than rest of the world. None of these were computer based.

Information Technology needs to address the business of :

•Collect

•Convert

•Process &

•Transmit information SECURELY.

Here security means:

•Privacy

•Reliability

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Enigma machine [1941]

Enigma machine used by germans posed serious threat to allied forces due to its encryption on the fly. It was used to encrypt operational level commands by German forces

The Enigma machine was used by the Germans to encrypt low level secret

communications, such as battlefield communications or communications to U-Boats. It was a mechanical device which operated on letters. An operator encrypted

a message using a typewriter like interface and then the encoded message was sent using Morse Code.

The Lorenz machine was the machine used by the Germans for more strategic

communication. It took as input a message encoded using what is called a Baudotcode. Baudot code had been used for years for teleprinter communications, and is

essentially a conversion of the message into binary (a "binary encoding"): 1s and 0s. The Lorenz cipher would then encrypt the message to produce another binary

encoding of the message (but now a binary encoding of the encrypted message).

Since the Lorenz cipher worked on binary encodings it could process information

much faster than the Enigma machine, since no one needed to type a message into the machine. The Lorenz cipher was used by Hitler to communicate between his

centres of command. If the Allies could break into the Lorenz information they would know what Hitler and his followers were actually thinking.

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Lorenz machine

In breaking the Enigma machine the British had the advantage of actually having an Enigma machine which had been recovered by the Polish. When breaking into the Lorenz machine though, they did

not have a clue how it worked at all. To make it worse still, picking up the airborn traffic was harder.

Intercepting the remote binary signal produced by Lorenz machines was much more difficult than

recognizing the Morse code used by the Enigma.

They worked out exactly how the Lorenz machine worked just from seeing scrambled messages

However, by setting up listening stations the British recovered enough messages for the British cryptographers at Bletchley to actually work out exactly how the Lorenz machine worked, without

ever seeing one. It was an amazing intellectual feat.

The cryptographers at Bletchley also worked out how to break the machine using subtle statistical weaknesses of the machine. Unfortunately, to actually exploit the weaknesses they needed to

process a large amount of data. A lot of calculations would need to be performed on a given target

message quickly. After all cracking a message years after it was sent wasn't a lot of help.

This meant that a machine would be needed to exploit the weaknesses found. To solve this problem Tommy Flowers, an engineer who worked for the post office, designed a machine which worked on

the digital data stream of the Lorenz traffic and could carry out the statistical tests needed to find the

key. One of the things he needed to take into account when designing the machine though was that

different tests might be needed to be used at different times. As a result he designed the machine in a flexible way so that it could carry out whatever tests ended up being needed.

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The Colossus

So Colossus was able to process digital data. It was also able to perform different tasks, including ones that were not envisaged by its designers. Even better you could use Colossus to perform other calculations that were not necessarily related to code breaking. That's a feature which distinguishes it from the Bombes, and a feature which makes its claim as the first modern computer.

In short, Colossus was a programmable digital computer just as modern computers are. One distinct difference between Colossus and modern computers though is that Colossus was programmed by someone connecting various pieces of the machine together using wires. A modern computer's program is stored with its data, inside the machine. This improvement did not come until a machine called the Manchester Baby in 1948.

The Colossus allowed the breaking of the most important German communications and so allowed the Allies in the last years of the war to see inside the minds of the Nazis. Apart from its code breaking use the Colossus is important because it was the first digital computer to be able to be used for different tasks. It was therefore the first machine to partially fulfill Alan Turing's pre-war idea of a Universal Machine which can be programmed to compute anything.

Many of the Bletchley team went onto build the first post war computers in the UK, at Manchester and Cambridge. Many of the US computer pioneers also had secret access to Colossus during the war.

However, the Colossus' role has only recently been fully recognized. The machines were all apparently destroyed at the end of the war, and their existance was kept secret until only recently. Of the 10 000 people who worked at Bletchley none spoke of what they had been involved in or even of Bletchley Park's existence for 30 years when its existence eventually became public knowledge.

The ideas behind the Lorenz cipher are very similar to the type of stream ciphers used to encrypt large data quantities in modern devices, such as your mobile phone. The ideas behind Colossus which broke the Lorenz cipher had to be kept secret because govenments continued using ciphers based on the same principles as Lorenz for a long time. Luckily the early computer pioneers really could keep a secret.

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Manchester Baby and its computer program by Tom Kilburn

[1948]

IBM thought world will need around 8 computer

This required very high skill level. Use of computer required very advanced

knowledge of Electrical engineering. Computers were limited to research and applications requiring complicated calculations.

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Binary number system

Acanthostega ( approx. 350 million BC) had eight

fingers on each hand. This would have gave us natural

binary number system. Current decimal number system

is rooted our having ten fingers.

The decimal number system was invented in India and

spread to rest of the world by Arabs.

Digital Computers can understand only 0/1, Binary system is

required to work. This gives us numbers with base 2 – other

popular radix are: base 8 (Octal) and base 16 (Hexadecimal)

Unlike us computer can only understand two things – on/off, yes/no

World of computer is a binary one. The numbers and symbols we use today are not

god gifted. Actually we missed a gala oportunity that came across as Acanthostega– an animal that lived some 350 million ago. It had eight fingers – If we had such

hands, probably we would have gone for a hexadecimal number system. But right now we have to live with converting our decimal numbers to

Hexadecimal/octal/binary for computers to understand us.

Early users of computer had to code the commands used by computers manually

and used to enter them by had using switches.

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Jaquard (1804, France)

Looms were first to introduce sequential programmed process control using punched cards

Herman Hollerith adopted punched cards as major medium of IT for processing census data [1890] and formed Tabulating Machine Company –one of the company that merged to form IBM. Punch card was in common use till early eighties.

A blank punched card

Punched cards were first used around 1725 by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste

Falcon as a more robust form of the perforated paper rolls then in use for controlling textile looms in France. This technique was greatly improved by Joseph Marie

Jacquard in his Jacquard loom in 1801. A few decades later Charles Babbagelaunched the idea of the use of the punched cards as a way to control a mechanical

calculator he designed. Herman Hollerith developed punched card data processing technology for the 1890 US census and founded the Tabulating Machine Company

(1896) which was one of three companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), later renamed IBM. IBM manufactured

and marketed a variety of unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after expanding into computers in the late 1950s. IBM

developed punch card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines. By 1950,

the IBM card and IBM unit record machines had become ubiquitous in industry and government. "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," a generalized version of the warning

that appeared on some punched cards, became a motto for the post-World War IIera (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant).

During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means

for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available. Punched cards were still commonly used for data entry and programing

until the mid-1970s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punched

cards obsolete for this role as well.

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Some new words

Bit : 1

Byte : 10010011

Word : 10001101 10001111

FLOPS : Floating point operation per second

Clock speed : Freq. the master clock in microprocessor runs

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Hardware and software

User

Hardware

Software

10001001

11011001

11001111

Hello!

All that thing that a computer does is done by hardware. Software is the information

part – that makes computer do what is does.

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IBM 1401 [1960]

Second generation and third generation computer found a way to avoid

cumbersome method of coding each and every command in terms of 1 & 0.

They coded the command by assembly language – using a short mnemonic code

for each binary code computer used. A program called assembler converted the text of assembly language to machine code.

The process of loading these different program, storing – in short all operations done by computer with its environment used another program called operation

system.

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ComputerComputerComputer

Program/OS/Computer

Computer

Binary

Code

OS

High

level

program

Electronics

The programmers actually interacted with operating system, giving commands in

high language that was understandable to humans. OS in turn loaded different programs from its primary and secondary memory and passed the binary codes to

the electronic circuitry of computer.

Even today, the process remains the same.

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3rd generation computer [1960-70]

Third generation computers were impressive devices. It occupied huge halls and

required special wiring and air-conditioning.

What you see in the picture above is a typical set-up of 3rd generation computer.

Magnetic tape and punched cards were the main input output medium. It used to have a few Hard disks – a typical 40MB disk came in the size of a filing cabinet. If

you wanted to transfer information from one place to another, you used to physically carry the deck of cards or tape.

In seventies, communication technology advanced sufficiently to allow connecting one computer to another by modems.

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MICR introduced [1964]

Invention of MICR allowed Banks to take computing in big way

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Commodore [1980]

HDD - ~5MB

8 BIT CPU [8085. Z80, 6800]

Monitor – 80 char /line

ROM BASIC

Optional CP/M as OS

Philips invents CDROM

Microsoft thought 640MB is all the internal memory one will ever need

IBM introduced IBM-PC based on intel 8088

Discovery of VLSI chips and microprocessors made it possible to build computers

for personal use. Computers became house hold goods.

These computers had ROM BASIC. Many stored the program and data in music

cassets. But quickly this was replaced by 5.25” floppy

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1981 – IBM PC

12th of August, IBM showed its IBM 5150 PC (personal computer) that is based on the 4.77 MHz 8 bit 8088 CPU of Intel 64KB RAM, 40KB ROM, one 5.25-inch floppy drive (160KB capacity) costing $3000 –6000

8088 had internal 16bit execution, but external 8 bit data bus

Original PC has ROM-BASIC as OS, later switched to PC-DOS

IBM published all technical details of the hardware and software, making it possible to any body to develop clones of their machine

IBM PC changed the way computing was done in a big way.

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Parts of a computer

A computer consists:

•Input devices – Keyboard, mouse, joy stick, Tablet, Scanner, modem. microphone

etc

•Output devices – Monitor, projector, printer, Modem, CD-W

•CPU – that has electronic circuits, storage devices like HDD, CDROM, Floppy,

Ports like serial, parallel, USB

These features remain very much the same from desktop to super computer.

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How computers (Microprocessor) work

8080

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Trend in microprocessor

~7,00032 bits

64-bit bus3.6 GHz0.09125,000,0002004Pentium 4 "Prescott"

~1,70032 bits

64-bit bus1.5 GHz0.1842,000,0002000Pentium 4

~51032 bits

64-bit bus450 MHz0.259,500,0001999Pentium III

~30032 bits

64-bit bus233 MHz0.357,500,0001997Pentium II

10032 bits

64-bit bus60 MHz0.83,100,0001993Pentium

2032 bits25 MHz11,200,000198980486

532 bits16 MHz1.5275,000198580386

116 bits6 MHz1.5134,000198280286

0.3316 bits

8-bit bus5 MHz329,00019798088

0.648 bits2 MHz66,00019748080

MIPSData widthClock speedMicronsTransistorsDateName

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Hardware trends

20202000198019601940

Molecular level minituarization

Massively parallel system

Optics & Chemical based circuits

Pervasive computing

VLSI chips

Multiple CPU

Large internal memory

Highly connected

Chemical compound in circuit

Microprocessors based

Single CPU

Small primary memory

Stand alone

All Semiconductors

Transistor devices

Many manual steps

Hardly any internal storage capacity

First electronic computer

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Xerox Star (8010),

GUI based interface

This had most innovations that we see in intrfaces today

Computer based video games

becomes popular

In 80’s XEROX came out with X-Windows; in true legacy of XEROX, this was the

father of all GUI interface we have today.

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Y2K

Y2K fever grips industry

Industries grapple with massive code re write

Java/C becomes industry std replacing COBOL

Packaged applications, ERP is the popular over custom developed software

IBM anonunces Blue Gene –commercial super computer capable of running at 1 pentaflop

Year 2000 saw some major shift in computing trend.

The threat of Y2k resulted in junking of many legacy software and paved way to newer technology. It also saw innovation software development techniques,

dependence of off-the –shelf application package.

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Shift in technology

In the 1980s computers and communication industries had little intersection with

each other or with content industries

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Shift in technology

The mid 1990s saw experimentation of interactive CD ROM and less interactive

web based developments bridging the industries

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The markets demand for greater interactivity and righer content has driven

innovation in computing, communications and content.

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2016

The industries will be highly inter-dependent and inter-mingled to the point of being

indistinguishable.

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Digital convergence

Today the trend of digital convergence is very clear.

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Software trends

20202000198019601940

Autonomous

Agents

Self aware

SOA based

Natural language

DLL

Objects

Library

Multi threading

GUI

Distributed

Object oriented

Modular

Messaging

Interpreted/partially compiled

RDBMS –DB/2, Oracle

High level language

Procedure

Monolithic

Compiled

CODASYL developed Data Bases

Binary codes

Assembly language

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Networking

Topology– Point-to-point

– Token ring

Spread– LAN

– WAN

Media– Wired

– IR

– Blue tooth

– WiFi

Speed– Traditional

– Broadband

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Internet

Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published Packet switching theory [July,1961]J.C.R. Licklider of MIT presented many short memos August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept US ministry of Defense wants a robust communication system that will survive nuclear holocastARPAnet started on experimental basis [1969]ARPAnet opened for non-military use [1970]ARPANET host protocol changes from NCP to TCP/IP [Jan 1, 1983]Concept of Domain name formed [1984]BBS operators rule the world with dial-up modems [1985]Shareware, newsgroup and E-Mail uses spread amongst computer users [1990]Tim Berners-Lee invents HTTP [1989]

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© Soumyanath Chatterjee, 2007

Internet tim

eline

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Internet tools

Browser

Whois

Email

UUCP

rlogin

telnet

FTP

VPN

IP-Phone

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Information transfer over internet

You can see how the message is transferred at http://visualroute.visualware.com/

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Security

Privacy protection

– While storing

– While transmission

– While execution

Access control

– Physical

– Assets

– Network

Reliability

– System failure

– Disaster recovery

– Accidental mishaps

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Distributed computing

Internet

UUCP/rlogin/Telnet/FTP

http/Web

Terminal Server

Citrix – thin client technology

CORBA

XML/XSL

WSDL/SOAP

Need for communication gave rise to various program like UUCP – Unix to Unix

Copying. It allowed computer to link and transfer data using dial-up modem.

With real time communication being available it was possible to login to remote

computer. So one could access the information remotely. Telnet and rlogin are the popular textbased protocol used for that.

In telnet/rlogin you actually login to the remote computer and see the screen as you would have done sitting at the console. For transferring files this is not a convinient

thing to do. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the protocol that allowed transferring files over internet to remote computer.

Internet created a big challenge and opportunity to the computing. Suddenly you are able to send information across globe at the cost of a local call – on real time

(almost). This feature was quickly exploited by a innovation called CORBA is the acronym for Common Object Request Broker Architecture, OMG's open, vendor-

independent architecture and infrastructure that computer applications use to work together over networks. Using the standard protocol IIOP, a CORBA-based

program from any vendor, on almost any computer, operating system, programming language, and network, can interoperate with a CORBA-based program from the

same or another vendor, on almost any other computer, operating system, programming language, and network.

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SOAP

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a way for a program running in one kind

of operating system (such as Windows 2000) to communicate with a progam in the same or another kind of an operating system (such as Linux) by using the World

Wide Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)and its Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the mechanisms for information exchange. Since Web

protocols are installed and available for use by all major operating system platforms, HTTP and XML provide an already at-hand solution to the problem of how programs

running under different operating systems in a network can communicate with each other. SOAP specifies exactly how to encode an HTTP header and an XML file so

that a program in one computer can call a program in another computer and pass it information. It also specifies how the called program can return a response. SOAP

was developed by Microsoft, DevelopMentor, and Userland Software and has been proposed as a standard interface to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It

is somewhat similar to the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), a protocol that is part of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Sun Microsystems'

Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is a similar client/server interprogram protocol between programs written in Java.

An advantage of SOAP is that program calls are much more likely to get through

firewall servers that screen out requests other than those for known applications (through the designated port mechanism). Since HTTP requests are usually allowed

through firewalls, programs using SOAP to communicate can be sure that they can communicate with programs anywhere.

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Discussion

E-Mail : [email protected]

YMS ID : soumyanath

URL: http://www.soumya.name

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/~stephen/history/

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/microprocessor.htm

http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1947.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

http://www.thocp.net/software/software_reference/introduction_to_software_history.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_networking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_network

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks (ISBN 0-13-349945-6)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrix_Systems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORBA

http://www.corba.org/success.htm

http://www.w3.org/XML/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP

http://developers.sun.com/appserver/reference/techart/overview_wsdl.html