Introduction To Information Management

Information Technology is not Computer Science

ITM-1: Day 1
© Soumyanath Chatterjee, 2007

5

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.

6

Basic Information Technology

Collect Distribute
Process

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.

7

IT processes

Input/
Document
Output Process Decision

Prepare Manual Input Sum Or

Collate Merge
Sort
Extract

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)

8

Computer : An IT tool

Pascal's Arithmetic
Abacus [1000 BC] Napier's Bones [1600 AD]
Machine [1640]

Leibniz's Step IBM Mark-I
Reckoner [1671] [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

9

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 Baudot
code. 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.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.

13

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.

14

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 Babbage
launched 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 II
era (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.

15

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

16

Hardware and software

Hello!

User
Software

Hardware

10001001
11011001
11001111

All that thing that a computer does is done by hardware. Software is the information
part – that makes computer do what is does.

17

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.

18

Program/OS/Computer

High
level
Computer
Computer
Computer program

OS

Binary
Code

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.

19

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.

20

MICR introduced [1964]


Invention of MICR allowed Banks to take computing in big way

21

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

22

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.

23

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.

24

How computers (Microprocessor) work

8080

25

Trend in microprocessor

Name Date Transistors Microns Clock speed Data width MIPS

8080 1974 6,000 6 2 MHz 8 bits 0.64

16 bits
8088 1979 29,000 3 5 MHz 0.33
8-bit bus

80286 1982 134,000 1.5 6 MHz 16 bits 1

80386 1985 275,000 1.5 16 MHz 32 bits 5

80486 1989 1,200,000 1 25 MHz 32 bits 20

32 bits
Pentium 1993 3,100,000 0.8 60 MHz 100
64-bit bus

32 bits
Pentium II 1997 7,500,000 0.35 233 MHz ~300
64-bit bus

32 bits
Pentium III 1999 9,500,000 0.25 450 MHz ~510
64-bit bus

32 bits

Pentium 4 2000 42,000,000 0.18 1.5 GHz ~1,700
64-bit bus

32 bits
Pentium 4 "Prescott" 2004 125,000,000 0.09 3.6 GHz ~7,000
64-bit bus

26

Hardware trends

First electronic Transistor Microprocessors VLSI chips Molecular level
computer devices based minituarization
Multiple CPU
Many manual Single CPU Massively
steps Large internal parallel system
Small primary memory
Hardly any memory Optics &
internal storage Stand alone Highly Chemical based
capacity connected circuits
All
Semiconductors Chemical Pervasive
compound in computing
circuit

1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

27

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.

28

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.

29

Shift in technology


In the 1980s computers and communication industries had little intersection with
each other or with content industries

30

Shift in technology


The mid 1990s saw experimentation of interactive CD ROM and less interactive
web based developments bridging the industries

31


The markets demand for greater interactivity and righer content has driven
innovation in computing, communications and content.

32

2016


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

33

Digital convergence


Today the trend of digital convergence is very clear.

34

Software trends

Binary codes High level Object DLL Autonomous
language oriented
Assembly Objects Agents
language Procedure Modular
Library Self aware
Monolithic Messaging
Multi SOA based
Compiled Interpreted/ threading
partially Natural
CODASYL compiled GUI language
developed Data

Bases
RDBMS – Distributed
DB/2, Oracle
1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

35

Networking

Topology
– Point-to-point
– Token ring
Spread
– LAN
– WAN
Media
– Wired
– IR
– Blue tooth
– WiFi
Speed

– Traditional
– Broadband

36

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 holocast
ARPAnet 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]

37


Internet timeline
38

Internet tools

Browser
Whois
Email
UUCP
rlogin
telnet
FTP
VPN
IP-Phone

39

Information transfer over internet


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

40

Security

Privacy protection
– While storing
– While transmission
– While execution
Access control
– Physical
– Assets
– Network
Reliability
– System failure

– Disaster recovery
– Accidental mishaps

41

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.

42

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.

43

Discussion

E-Mail : me@soumya.name
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

44

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