UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY

Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

MODULE IN LIVING IN THE I.T. ERA

Course Code : GEEL 1 / ELECTIVE 1MT

Course Title : LIVING IN THE I.T. ERA
Credit Units : 3.0
Course Description :

This course explores the science, culture and ethics of information

technology, its various uses and applications, as well as its influence
on culture and society. It will provide knowledge on new technologies,
modern innovations, technology trends and the history of Information
Technology age. It aims to strike a balance between conceptual instruction
and socially and culturally-oriented discussions as it not only explains
the basic concepts or key terms in IT but also features the major IT trends
along with the issues and challenges these developments bring.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this module, students are expected to:

Cognitive

 Compare the different discoveries and inventions in all ages and

generations of computer.
 Examine the different Trends of Technology and its impact to society.

Affective

 Show an appreciation on the evolution of Mobile Operating Systems.

 Display an appreciation on the influence of IT, practice of proper
netiquette and negative practices in social media.

Psychomotor

 Apply current technical concepts and practices in the core of

information technologies.

Intended Learning Outcomes:

 Identify the machines that were developed and made a remarkable

contribution in the development of the modern computers.

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

 Appreciate the major contributions of some experts in the improvement

of computing technologies.

LESSON 2. FOUR BASIC PERIODS OF COMPUTER HISTORY

Information technology has been around for a long, long time. There are 4
main ages that divide up the history of information technology. Only the
latest age (electronic) and some of the electromechanical age really
affects us today, but it is important to learn about how we got to the
point we are at with technology today.

Computing Periods

Four basic periods, each characterized by a principal technology used to

solve the input, processing, output and communication problems of the
time:

A. Premechanical
B. Mechanical
C. Electromechanical
D. Electronic

A. The Premechanical Age: 3000 B.C. - 1450 A.D.

1. Writing and Alphabets. The first humans communicated only through

speaking and picture drawings. In 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia
(what is today southern Iraq) devised a writing system. The system, called
"cuneiform" used signs corresponding to spoken sounds, instead of pictures,
to express words. From this first information system — writing — came
civilization as we know it today. The Phoenicians around 2000 B.C. further
simplified writing by creating symbols that expressed single syllables and
consonants (the first true alphabet). The Greeks later adopted the
Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; the Romans gave the letters Latin
names to create the alphabet we use today.

2. Paper and Pens. For the Sumerians, input technology consisted of a pen
like device called a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay. About
2600 B.C., the Egyptians discovered that they could write on the papyrus
plant, using hollow reeds or rushes to hold the first "ink" - pulverized
carbon or ash mixed with lamp oil and gelatin from boiled donkey skin.
Other societies wrote on bark, leaves, or leather. The Chinese developed

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

techniques for making paper from rags, on which modern-day papermaking is

based, around 100 A.D.

3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices. Religious leaders in

Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books" a collection of rectangular clay
tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in labeled containers — in
their personal "libraries." The Egyptians kept scrolls - sheets of papyrus
wrapped around a shaft of wood. Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold
sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together. The
dictionary and encyclopedia made their appearance about the same time. The
Greeks are also credited with developing the first truly public libraries
around 500 B.C.

4. The First Numbering Systems. The Egyptians struggled with a system that
depicted the numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or circle,
the number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus blossom.
The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented
between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created a nine-digit
numbering system. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed. It
was through the Arab traders that today's numbering system — 9 digits plus
a 0 — made its way to Europe sometime in the 12th century.

5. The First Calculators. The existence of a counting tool called the

abacus, one of the very first information processors, permitted people to
"store" numbers temporarily and to perform calculations using beads strung
on wires. It continued to be an important tool throughout the Middle Ages.

B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 – 1840

1. The First Information Explosion. Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany,

invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450 and sped up
the process of composing pages from weeks to a few minutes. The printing
press made written information much more accessible to the general
public by reducing the time and cost that it took to reproduce written
material. The development of book indexes (alphabetically sorted lists
of topics and names) and the widespread use of page numbers also made
information retrieval a much easier task. These new techniques of
organizing information would become valuable later in the development
of files and databases.

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

2. Math by Machine. The first general purpose "computers" were actually

people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
Difficulties in human errors were slowing scientists and mathematicians
in their pursuit of greater knowledge.

3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.

a. Slide Rule. In the early 1600s, William Oughtred, an English

clergyman, invented the slide rule, a device that allowed the user
to multiply and divide by sliding two pieces of precisely machines
and scribed wood against each other. The slide rule is an early
example of an analog computer — an instrument that measures instead
of counts.

b. Pascaline. Blaise Pascal, later to become a famous French

mathematician, built one of the first mechanical computing machines
as a teenager, around 1642. It was called a Pascaline, and it used a
series of wheels and cogs to add and subtract numbers.

c. Leibniz's Machine. Gottfried von Leibniz, an important German

mathematician and philosopher (he independently invented calculus at
the same time as Newton) was able to improve on Pascal's machine in
the 1670s by adding additional components that made multiplication
and division easier.

4. Babbage's Engines

a. The Difference Engine. An eccentric English mathematician named

Charles Babbage, frustrated by mistakes, set his mind to creating a
machine that could both calculate numbers and print the results. In
the 1820s, he was able to produce a working model of his first
attempt, which he called the Difference Engine (the name was based
on a method of solving mathematical equations called the "method of
differences"). Made of toothed wheels and shafts turned by a hand
crank, the machine could do computations and create charts showing
the squares and cubes of numbers. He had plans for a more complex
Difference Engine but was never able to actually build it because of
difficulties in obtaining funds, but he did create and leave behind
detailed plans.

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

b. The Analytical Engine. Designed during the 1830s by Babbage, the

Analytical Engine had parts remarkably similar to modern-day
computers. For instance, the Analytical Engine was to have a part
called the "store," which would hold the numbers that had been
inputted and the quantities that resulted after they had been
manipulated. It was also to have a part called the "mill" - an area
in which the numbers were actually manipulated. Babbage also planned
to use punch cards to direct the operations performed by the machine
— an idea he picked up from seeing the results that a French weaver
named Joseph Jacquard had achieved using punched cards to
automatically control the patterns that would be woven into cloth by
a loom.

c. Augusta Ada Byron. She helped Babbage design the instructions that
would be given to the machine on punch cards (for which she has been
called the "first programmer") and to describe, analyze, and
publicize his ideas. Babbage eventually was forced to abandon his
hopes of building the Analytical Engine, once again because of a
failure to find funding.

C. The Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940

The discovery of ways to harness electricity was the key advance made
during this period. Knowledge and information could now be converted into
electrical impulses.

1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication. Technologies that form the basis

for modern-day telecommunication systems include:

a. Voltaic Battery. The discovery of a reliable method of creating

and storing electricity (with a voltaic battery) at the end of the
18th century made possible a whole new method of communicating
information.

b. Telegraph. The telegraph, the first major invention to use

electricity for communication purposes, made it possible to transmit
information over great distances with great speed.

c. Morse Code. The usefulness of the telegraph was further enhanced

by the development of Morse Code in 1835 by Samuel Morse, an American

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

from Poughkeepsie, New York. Morse devised a system that broke down
information (in this case, the alphabet) into bits (dots and dashes)
that could then be transformed into electrical impulses and
transmitted over a wire (just as today's digital technologies break
down information into zeros and ones).

d. Telephone and Radio. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone

in 1876. This was followed by the discovery that electrical waves
travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at
which they originated. These two events led to the invention of the
radio by Marconi in 1894.

2. Electromechanical Computing

a. Herman Hollerith and IBM. By 1890, Herman Hollerith, a young man

with a degree in mining engineering who worked in the Census Office
in Washington, D.C., had perfected a machine that could automatically
sort census cards into a number of categories using electrical sensing
devices to "read" the punched holes in each card and thus count the
millions of census cards and categorize the population into relevant
groups. The company that he founded to manufacture and sell it
eventually developed into the International Business Machines
Corporation (IBM).

b. Mark 1. Howard Aiken, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University,

decided to try to combine Hollerith's punched card technology with
Babbage's dreams of a general-purpose, "programmable" computing
machine. With funding from IBM, he built a machine known as the Mark
I, which used paper tape to supply instructions(programs) to the
machine for manipulating data (input on paper punch cards), counters
to store numbers, and electromechanical relays to help register
results.

D. The Electronic Age: 1940 - Present

1. First Tries. In the early 1940s, scientists around the world began
to realize that electronic vacuum tubes, like the type used to create
early radios, could be used to replace electromechanical parts.

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

2. Eckert and Mauchly.

a. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes,

the ENIAC. John Mauchly, a physicist, and J. Prosper Eckert, an
electrical engineer, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering
at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the U.S. Army, developed
the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) in 1946. It
could add, subtract, multiply and divide in milliseconds and
calculate the trajectory of an artillery round in about 20 seconds.

b. The First Stored-Program Computer. A problem with the ENIAC was

that the machine had no means of storing program instructions in its
memory - to change the instructions, the machine would literally have
to be rewired. Mauchly and Eckert began to design the EDVAC - the
Electronic Discreet Variable Computer -to address this problem. John
von Neumann joined the team as a consultant and produced an
influential report in June 1945 synthesizing and expanding on Eckert
and Mauchly's ideas, which resulted in von Neumann being credited as
the originator of the stored program concept. Maurice Wilkes, a
British scientist at Cambridge University, completed the EDSAC
(Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) two years before
EDVAC was finished, thereby taking the claim of the first stored-
program computer.

c. The First General-Purpose Computer for Commercial Use. Eckert and

Mauchly began the development of a computer called UNIVAC (Universal
Automatic Computer), which they hoped would be the world's first
general-purpose computer for commercial use, but they ran out of
money and sold their company to Remington Rand. A machine called LEO
(Lyons Electronic Office) went into action a few months before UNIVAC
and became the world's first commercial computer.

3. The Generations of Digital Computing. Information technology has

traditionally been broken down into four or five distinct stages or
computer generations, each marked by the technology used to create the
main logic element (the electronic component used to store and process
information) used in computers during the period.

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 UNIVERSITY OF CAGAYAN VALLEY
Tuguegarao City

College Freshmen Program (CFP)

First Semester, School Year 2021-2022

References:

http://informationtechnoluogy.blogspot.com/
https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html
https://ehs.siu.edu/_common/documents/IT%20newsletter/vol-2-no-29.pdf

Prepared by:

IT INSTRUCTORS

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