Information Technology is a developing technology

 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

 

INTRODUCTION

Information Technology is a developing technology that aims at obtaining the maximum information with minimum of resources, labour or time.  According to the dictionary, Information Technology is “the study or use of electronic equipment especially computers, for storing, analysing and distribution of information of all kinds, including words, numbers and pictures.”

Ever since the appearance of Man on the earth, information has been the major cause of his progress and development.  But information alone is not enough.  Information has to be processed, put to use by logic and reason before it becomes useful knowledge.

Information Technology includes and encompasses within itself the whole technological, social and cultural phenomena that promise an excellent future for mankind.  The 21st century is a century of Information Technology.   Just as steam engine emerged to be the technology of the 19th century and computer technology enhanced the capacity of human brain in the 20th century, Information Technology is the in-thing in the 21 century.

The technological progress during the past sixty years has brought about an explosion in knowledge.  Today we have super computers imitating the human brain and even beating it in various fields like fast data processing, huge memory storage and quick retrieval capacity.  These super computers can do as much as Terra (10) floating point operations per second (FLOPS) and have a 128 bit word length.  The personal computer is today a part of many urban homes in the country.  The computer is changing its capacity so fast that while in the 70s the IC chips were operated with 18MHz clock, today the clock rate is 850MHz.  In the near future, we would have computers with a clock speed of 4000 MHz.  Similarly, the first microprocessor chip (intel 4004) produced in early seventies had 2500 transistors. We hope to have not in very far distant future, 350 million of these transistors sitting on a tiny little chip.  The semiconductor fabrication technology has made a possible for the latest memory devices to have a capacity of one Gigabyte (10 bytes) each, which is equivalent to the information stored in 8000 newspaper pages.  A single CD can store in itself the entire works of Shakespeare.  The most interesting part of the story of staggering progress is that while the number crunching capacity of the computer is going up in geometrical progression, the price or cost involved is falling down in an almost similar proportion.