USING INFORMATION

Technology
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USING INFORMATION A Practical Introduction

Technology Eleventh Edition

 to Computers & Communications

BRIAN K. WILLIAMS | STACEY C. SAWYER

USING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, ELEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2015 by McGraw
Hill Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Previous editions © 2013, 2011,
and 2010. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored
in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but
not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.
Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside
the United States.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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ISBN 978-0-07-351688-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Brian K., 1938
Using information technology / Brian K. Williams, Stacey C. Sawyer.—Eleventh edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-07-351688-2 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-07-351688-0 (alk. paper)
1. Telecommunication systems. 2. Information technology. I. Sawyer,
Stacey C. II. Title.
QA76.5.W5332 2015
004—dc23
2013046637

The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website
does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education
does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.
www.mhhe.com

Brief Contents

TO THE INSTRUCTORxv

1 INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: The Future Now 1 2

THE INTERNET & THE WORLD WIDE WEB: Exploring Cyberspace 49 3
SOFTWARE: Tools for Productivity & Creativity 113

4 HARDWARE: THE CPU & STORAGE—The Source of Computing Power 191

5 HARDWARE: INPUT & OUTPUT—Taking Charge of Computing
& Communications 247

6 COMMUNICATIONS, NETWORKS, & CYBERTHREATS: The Wired &

Wireless World 303

7 PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY: The Future Is You 367

8 THE ERA OF BIG DATA: Databases, Information Systems, & Artificial
Intelligence 407

9 THE CHALLENGES OF THE DIGITAL AGE: Society & Information

Technology Today 459

10 BUILDING SYSTEMS & APPLICATIONS: Software Development,

Programming, & Languages 503
NOTES551
CREDITS569
INDEX571

Brief Contents
v
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To the Instructor xv Desktop Computer: Basic Knowledge of How a Computer
Works 28

1
Input Hardware: Keyboard & Mouse 28
Processing & Memory Hardware: Inside the System Cabinet
30
INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION
Storage Hardware: Hard Drive & CD/DVD Drive 30 Output
TECHNOLOGY: THE FUTURE NOW 1
Hardware: Video & Sound Cards, Monitor, Speakers, & Printer
32
UNIT 1A: The Mobile World, Information Communications Hardware: Modem 33
Technology, & Your Life 2 Software 33

1.1 Information Technology & Your Life: The Future 1.6 Where Is Information Technology
Now 4 Headed? 34
Two Parts of IT: Computers & Communications 4 Education: Computers: Miniaturization, Speed, & Affordability 34
The Promise of More Interactive & Individualized Learning 4 Communications: Connectivity, Interactivity,
Health: High Tech for Wellness 6 & Multimedia 35
Money & Business: Toward the Cashless Society 10 Government When Computers & Communications Converge: Portability,
& Electronic Democracy: Participating in the Civic Realm 10 Personalization, Collaboration, Cloud Computing, &
Artificial Intelligence 36
Jobs & Careers 12
“E” Also Stands for Ethics 38
Your Personal Life 14

1.2 Information Technology Is Pervasive: Cellphones,

Email, the Internet, 2 THE INTERNET & THE WORLD WIDE
WEB:
& the E-World 15 EXPLORING CYBERSPACE 49
The Phone Grows Up 15
“You’ve Got Mail!” Email’s Mass Impact 16 The Internet, the UNIT 2A: The Internet & the Web 50
World Wide Web, & the “Plumbing of Cyberspace” 17
2.1 Connecting to the Internet: Narrowband, Broadband,
UNIT 1B: The Basics of Information & Access Providers 52
Technology 20 Narrowband (Dial-Up Modem): Low Speed but
Inexpensive 53
1.3 The Practical User: How Becoming Tech Smart
High-Speed Phone Lines: More Expensive but Available in Cities
Benefits You 20 & Most Towns 53
1.4 The “All-Purpose Machine”: The Varieties of Problem for Telephone Internet Connections:
The Last Mile 56
Computers 22
Cable Modem: Close Competitor to DSL 56
All Computers, Great & Small: The Categories of Satellite Wireless Connections 57
Machines 22
Supercomputers 23 Other Wireless Connections: Wi-Fi, 3G, & 4G 58 Contents
Mainframe Computers 24 Internet Access Providers 58
Workstations 24
2.2 How Does the Internet Work? 59
Microcomputers 24
Microcontrollers 26 Internet Connections: POPs, IXPs, Backbone,
vii
Servers 26 & Internet2 59

Contents
Internet Communications: Protocols, Packets,
& IP Addresses 60
Who Runs the Internet? 62

2.3 The World Wide Web 62

The Face of the Web: Browsers, Websites, & Web Pages 62 How the
1.5 Understanding Your Computer 27 Browser Finds Things: URLs 63
How Computers Work: Three Key Concepts 27 Customizing a The Nuts & Bolts of the Web: HTML & Hyperlinks 65 Using Your
 Browser to Get around the Web 66
Web Portals: Starting Points for
Finding Information 70
3 SOFTWARE: TOOLS FOR

Search Services & Search Engines PRODUCTIVITY & CREATIVITY 113

& How They Work 70
Four Web Search Tools: Individual Search Engines, Subject UNIT 3A: System Software: The Power behind
Directories, Metasearch Engines, & Specialized Search Engines 71
the Power 114
Smart Searching: Three General Strategies 73
Multimedia Search Tools: Image, Audio, & Video Searching 3.1 The Operating System: What It Does 115
74
Booting 116
Tagging: Saving Links for Easier Retrieval Later 74
CPU Management 118
UNIT 2B: The Riches & Risks File Management 118
of Internet Use 76 Task Management 119
Security Management 120
2.4 Email, Instant Messaging, & Other Ways
of Communicating over the Net 77 3.2 Other System Software: Device Drivers & Utility
Two Ways to Send & Receive Email 78 Programs 121
How to Use Email 78 Device Drivers: Running Peripheral Hardware 121 Utilities:
Instant Messaging 81 Service Programs 121
Discussion Groups: Mailing Lists, Newsgroups,
& Message Boards 83 3.3 Common Features of the User
FTP: For Transferring Large Files 83 Interface 124
The GUI: The Graphical User Interface 126 The Help
2.5 The Online Gold Mine: Telephony, Multimedia,
Command 133
Webcasting, Blogs, E-Commerce, & Social Networking 84
Telephony: The Internet Telephone 84 3.4 Common Operating Systems 133
Multimedia on the Web 85 Stand-Alone Operating Systems: Macintosh &
The Web Automatically Comes to You: Webcasting, Blogging, Windows 134
& Podcasting 88 Network Operating Systems: OES, Windows Server, Unix, &
E-Commerce: B2C, B2C, & C2C 90 Linux 140
Web 2.0, the Social Web: Social Networking, Media Sharing, & Embedded Operating Systems 142
Social-Network Aggregation 92
Web 3.0: Computer-Generated Information with Less Human UNIT 3B: Application Software: Getting Started
Interaction 93 144
2.6 The Intrusive Internet: Snooping, Spamming, Spoofing, 3.5 Application Software: Where to Get It, How to Use
Phishing, Pharming, Cookies, Spyware, It 144
Contents Sources of Software: For Sale, For Free, or For Rent? 145
& Malware 96 Tutorials & Documentation 148
Snooping on Your Email & Texts: Your Messages Are Open to Types of Application Software 149
Anyone 96 3.6 Data Files & Program Files 150 Data Files 150
viii Program Files 152
Spam: Electronic Junk Mail 97
Exchanging Data Files: Exporting & Importing 152 Data Compression:
Spoofing, Phishing, & Pharming: Phony Email Senders &
Websites 97 Putting More Data in Less Space 152
Cookies: Convenience or Hindrance? 98 3.7 Word Processing Software 153 3.8 Spreadsheet
Spyware—Adware, Browser & Search Hijackers, & Key Loggers: Programs 158
Intruders to Track Your Habits & Steal Your Data 98
The Basics: How Spreadsheet Programs Work 158 Analytical
Malware: The Viciousness of Viruses 100 Passwords
Graphics: Creating Charts 160
101
3.9 Database Software 161
The Benefits of Database Software 161
The Basics: How Databases Work 162 Cycle 209
3.10 Software Suites & Integrated Packages 164 The Control Unit & the Machine Cycle 210 The
Arithmetic/Logic Unit 211
Software Suites 164
Registers 211
Integrated Packages 164
Buses & Word Size 211
Personal Information Managers 164

3.11 Specialty Application Software 165 Presentation 4.5 Memory 212

Graphics Software 166 RAM 212
Financial Software 168 Cache Memory 213
Desktop Publishing 169 ROM 214
Drawing & Painting Programs 172 Flash Memory 214
Video/Audio Editing Software 172 CMOS 214
Animation Software 173
Multimedia Authoring Software 174
4.6 Expansion Cards, Bus Lines, & Ports 215
Web Page Design/Authoring Software 174 Project Expansion Slots & Adapter Cards 215 Expansion Bus
Management Software 176 Lines 216
Portable Document Format (PDF) 177 Ports 217
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) 178
4.3 Inside the System Unit: Power Supply, Motherboard, &
UNIT 4B: Secondary Storage 221 4.7 Secondary
Microprocessors 200 Bays, Buttons, & Boards 201 Storage 221
Power Supply 201 Hard Disks 221
The Motherboard & the Microprocessor Chip 203 The System Clock Optical Disks: CDs, DVDs, & Blu-ray Disks 225 Flash & Solid-
& Processing Speeds 208 State Memory 228
Smart Cards 228
4.4 The Central Processing Unit & the Machine
HARDWARE: THE CPU & STORAGE—THE 4.8 Future Developments in Processing &
4 SOURCE OF COMPUTING POWER 191
Cloud Storage 231
Storage 232

UNIT 4A: Processing: The System Unit, UNIT 5A: Input Hardware 249
Microprocessors, & Main Memory 192 Contents
4.1 Microchips, Miniaturization, & Mobility 5.1 Keyboards 249
193 The Different Types of Keyboards 250
ix
Miniaturization Miracles: Microchips Terminals 252
& Microprocessors 193
5.2 Pointing Devices 252
Miniaturization Leads to Mobility 195
The Mouse 253
The System Unit 196
Variations on the Mouse: Trackball, Touchpad, &
4.2 Representing Data Electronically 197 Pointing Stick 254
The Binary System: Using On/Off Electrical States to Touch Screen 256
Represent Data & Instructions 197 Multitouch Screen 256
Machine Language 200 Pen Input 258
Future Developments in Processing 232
Future Developments in Secondary Storage 235 5.3 Source Data-Entry Devices 260 Scanning &
Reading Devices 260

5
Image-Capture Devices 265
HARDWARE: INPUT & OUTPUT—
Audio-Input Devices 268
TAKING CHARGE OF COMPUTING Sensors 270
& COMMUNICATIONS 247 Biometric-Input Devices 271

5.4 The Future of Input 271

 Toward More Input from Remote Locations 272 Toward Types of Networks: WANs, MANs, & Others 310 Network
More Source Data Automation 273 Architectures: How Networks Are Structured— Client-Server &
Designs That Imitate the Physical World: Will They Be Peer to Peer 312
Abandoned? 275 Intranets, Extranets, VPNs, & Firewalls 313
Components of a Network 315
UNIT 5B: Output Hardware 275 Network Topologies 318
Ethernet 321
5.5 Softcopy Output: Display Screens 276 Features of
Display Screens 276 6.3 Wired Communications Media 324 Wired
Types of Display Devices 278 Communications Media: Wires & Cables 324 Wired
Communications Media for Homes 325
5.6 Hardcopy Output: Printers 280
6.4 Wireless Communications Media 327
Impact Printers 280
The Electromagnetic Spectrum, the Radio-Frequency (RF)
Nonimpact Printers 281 Spectrum, & Bandwidth 327
Multifunction Printers: Printers That Do More Than Print Five Types of Wireless Communications Media 329 Long-Distance
284 Wireless: One-Way Communication 332 Long-Distance Wireless:
Plotters 284 Two-Way Communication 335 Short-Range Wireless: Two-Way
Specialty Printers 285 Communication 338

5.7 Mixed Output: Sound, Voice, UNIT 6B: Cyberthreats, Security, & Privacy Issues
& Video 286 343
Sound Output 287
6.5 Cyberintruders: Trolls, Spies, Hackers, & Thieves
Voice Output 287
343
Video Output 287
Trolls 343
5.8 The Future of Output 288 Spies 344
More Unusual Forms of Output 288 Hackers 344
More Data Used in Output 288 Thieves 345
More Realistic Output 288
6.6 Cyberattacks & Malware 347
Contents Online Safety 350
5.9 Quality of Life: Health
& Ergonomics 290 6.7 Concerns about Privacy & Identity Theft 352 The Threat
Health Matters 290 to Privacy 353
x Identity Theft 354
Ergonomics: Design with People in Mind 292

6 COMMUNICATIONS, NETWORKS,
&
7 PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY:

THE FUTURE IS YOU 367

CYBERTHREATS: THE WIRED
& WIRELESS WORLD 303
UNIT 7A: Personal Devices for Improving
Productivity at School & Work 368
UNIT 6A: Networks & Wired & Wireless Media
304 7.1 Convergence, Portability,
6.1 From the Analog to the Digital Age 305 & Personalization 369
Analog versus Digital Electrical Signals: Continuous Waves Convergence 369
versus Discontinuous Bursts 305 Portability 370
Purpose of the Modem: Converting Digital Signals to Analog Personalization 371
Signals & Back 306 Popular Personal Technologies 371
6.2 Networks 308 7.2 Smartphones: More Than Talk 371 How Do
The Benefits of Networks 308
Cellphones & Smartphones Differ? 373 How a Mobile Phone Hierarchy 409
Works 373 The Key Field 411
Text Messaging 375
8.2 Database Management Systems 412 The Benefits of
Using Mobile Phones in College 376
Database Management Systems 412 Three Database
The Societal Effects of Mobile Phones 376 7.3 Components 414
Tablets & E-Readers 377 The Database Administrator 416

The Tablet: What It Is, What It Does 378 8.3 Database Models 416
The E-Reader: The Reading Machine 380 The Benefits Hierarchical Database 416
of E-Readers 380 Network Database 418
How an E-Reader Works 381 Relational Database 419
The Drawbacks of E-Readers 382 Object-Oriented Database 422
7.4 Portable Media Players 382 Multidimensional Database 423

Principal Features of MP3 Players 383 8.4 Data Mining 425

The Societal Effects of MP3 Players 384 The Process of Data Mining 426
Using MP3 Players in College 385
UNIT 8B: Big Data, Information Systems, &
UNIT 7B: Personal Devices for Enriching Leisure & Artificial Intelligence 428
Life 386 8.5 The Evolving World of Big Data 428 Three
7.5 Digital Cameras: Changing Implications of Big Data 428
Photography 386 The Uses of Big Data 429
How Digital Cameras Work 387 8.6 Information Systems in Organizations: Using
The Societal Effects of Digital Cameras 392
Databases to Help Make Decisions 430 The Qualities of Good
7.6 High-Tech Radio: Satellite, Hybrid Digital, & Internet Information 430
393 Information Flows within an Organization 430
Satellite Radio 393 Computer-Based Information Systems 432
HD Radio 394 Office Information Systems 433
Internet Radio 394 Transaction Processing Systems 434
Contents
7.7 Digital Television 396 Management Information Systems 435
Interactive, Internet, & Internet-Ready TV: What’s the Decision Support Systems 435
Difference? 396
Executive Support Systems 437
Three Kinds of Television: DTV, HDTV, SDTV 397 The
xi
Societal Effects of the New TV 398 Expert Systems 437
8.7 Artificial Intelligence 438
7.8 Videogame Systems: The Ultimate
Conventional AI versus Computational Intelligence: “Neats”
Convergence Machine? 399 versus “Scruffies” 438
Weak AI versus Strong AI 438

8 THE ERA OF BIG DATA: DATABASES,

INFORMATION
Expert Systems 439
Natural Language Processing 442
SYSTEMS, & ARTIFICIAL Intelligent Agents 442
INTELLIGENCE 407 Pattern Recognition 442
Virtual Reality & Simulation Devices 442
UNIT 8A: Files & Databases 408 Robotics 444
Fuzzy Logic 446
8.1 Managing Files: Basic Concepts 409 Neural Networks 447
How Data Is Organized: The Data Storage
8.8. Artificial Life, the Turing Test,
 & the Singularity 447 Protecting Children: Pornography, Sexual Predators, & Online
Bullies 492
How Can We Know a Machine Is Truly
Intelligent? 448 Workplace Problems: Impediments to Productivity 494
“The Singularity”: The Concept of Smarter-Than-Human 9.6 Economic & Political Issues: Employment & the
Computers 450
Haves/Have-Nots 496
Ethics in AI 451
Technology, the Job Killer? 496
Databases: Concerns about Privacy & Identity Theft 451
Digital Divide between Rich & Poor 497
Whom Does the Internet Serve? 497

9 THE CHALLENGES OF THE DIGITAL

AGE:
In a World of Breakneck Change, Can You Still Thrive? 498

SOCIETY & INFORMATION

TECHNOLOGY TODAY 459
10 BUILDING SYSTEMS & APPLICATIONS:
SOFTWARE
DEVELOPMENT,
UNIT 9A: Security, Privacy, & Surveillance Concerns PROGRAMMING, & LANGUAGES 503
460
9.1 Security Issues: Threats to Computers & UNIT 10A: Systems Development &
Communications Systems 461 Programming 504
Errors, Accidents, & Natural Hazards 461
10.1 Systems Development & the Life Cycle of a
Computer Crimes 464
Software Project 505
9.2 Security Safeguards: Protecting The Purpose of Systems Analysis & Design 505 Getting the
Computers & Communications 470 Project Going: How It Starts, Who’s Involved 506
Deterrents to Computer Crime 470 The Six Phases of Systems Analysis & Design 507 The First
Identification & Access 472 Phase: Preliminary Investigation 507 The Second Phase:
Encryption 474 Systems Analysis 509
Protection of Software & Data 474 The Third Phase: Systems Design 511
Disaster-Recovery Plans 475 The Fourth Phase: Systems Development 512 The Fifth
Phase: Systems Implementation 513 The Sixth Phase:
9.3 Privacy & Surveillance: Data Collectors & Spies 475 Systems Maintenance 514

Contents 10.2 Programming: Traditionally a Five-Step Procedure

Business & Cyberspying 476
515
Government & Cyberspying 477
The First Step: Clarify the Programming Needs 516 The Second
Spying, Hacking, & Cyberwarfare by Foreign
xii Step: Design the Program 517
Governments & Groups 482 The Third Step: Code the Program 523
UNIT 9B: Other Social, Economic, & The Fourth Step: Test the Program 523
Political Issues 484 The Fifth Step: Document & Maintain
the Program 525
9.4 Truth Issues: Manipulating Digital Data 484 Manipulation
of Sound 485
UNIT 10B: Programming
Manipulation of Photos 485
Languages 526
Manipulation of Video & Television 487
10.3 Five Generations of Programming Languages
9.5 Quality-of-Life Issues: The Environment, Mental
526
Health, Child Protection,
First Generation: Machine Language 528
& the Workplace 487
Second Generation: Assembly Language 528 Third
Environmental Problems 487
Generation: High-Level or Procedural Languages 529
Mental Health Problems 490
Fourth Generation: Very-High-Level or Problem-Oriented
Languages 531 Telecommuting & Telework: The Virtual
Fifth Generation: Natural Languages 531 Workplace 323
Virtual Meetings: Linking Up Electronically 342 The
10.4 Programming Languages Used Today 532 Consequences of Choice Overload 372
FORTRAN 532 Multitasking—Good for Productivity? 381
COBOL 532 Online Viewing & Sharing of Digital Photos 391 Accuracy
BASIC 534 & Completeness 415
Pascal 534
Is the Boss Watching You? Trust in the Workplace 478
C 534
C11 534 Experience Box
LISP 534 Better Organization & Time Management: Dealing with the
Information Deluge in College—& in Life 39
10.5 Object-Oriented & Visual Web Research, Term Papers, & Plagiarism 102 Getting
Programming 535 Help from Tech Support 180
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) 535 Visual How to Buy a Laptop 237
Programming: The Example of Visual BASIC 537 Good Habits: Protecting Your Computer System, Your Data, &
Your Health 293
10.6 Markup & Scripting Languages 537 HTML 540 Guarding Your Privacy & Preventing Your Identity from Getting
VRML 540 Stolen 357
XML 540 The “Always On” Generation 402
JavaScript 541 How the Rise of the Robots Will Affect Future
Flash 541 Employment 452
ActiveX 541 Student Use of Computers: Some Controversies 499 Critical
CGI (Common Gateway Interface) 542 Thinking Tools 543
Perl 542
PHP (Personal Home Page, or PHP Hypertext Contents
Preprocessor) 542 Tech Tales
The Rise of Mobile Computing: The Getting-Smarter
Smartphone 2
Notes 551
Technology in Education: Adjusting Instructor xiii
Credits 569
Presentations to the Students 5
Index 571 New Telemedicine: The Doctor Will See You Now— Right
Practical Action Box Now 8
How to Be a Successful Online Student 7
What Apps Do You Really Need? 20
Managing Email 18
Artificial Intelligence: The Use of Algorithms to Create a Hit
Evaluating & Sourcing Information Found on Song 38
the Web 75
How a World-Shaking Technology Came About: Tim Berners-
Serious Web Search Techniques 76
Lee Invents the World Wide Web 63
Social Networking: The Downside 94
The Continuing Development of Browsers: The War for
Tips for Avoiding Spyware 100 Smartphones & Tablets 66
Utility Programs: Specialized Programs to Make Web Imaging & Aerial Mapping: Google Earth 86
Computing Easier 122
Animation: The Making of “Fetch,” a Mobile
Help in Building Your Web Page 177
Game 87
Power Issues: Problems with Electric Power to Your
Computer 205 The Rise of the Blogosphere: “Writing Out Loud” 89
Starting Over with Your Hard Drive: Erasing, Changing Retail Practices: The Fight against
Reformatting, & Reloading 224 “Showrooming” 91
Storing Your Stuff: How Long Will Digitized Data Last? How Difficult It Is to Keep Your Emails & Texts Private
230 96
Buying a Printer 286 The War for Dominance in Mobile Operating
 Systems 116 Applying Fuzzy Logic to Elevators 446
New Technology to Replace the Mouse: The Gesture Interface A Scene from the Turing Test 449
125
How Slow Perceptions Lead to Errors: Texting While Driving
China Adopts Linux as Its National Standard 142 461
Software Evolution: 40 Years of Blasting Space Aliens—the Glitches in the System: How Electrical & Mechanical Problems
Incredible Growth in Videogames 144 Can Make Computers Fail 462
Free Software for Cash-Strapped Students 148 Vacuum The Risks of Natural Hazards: How Bad Can It Get?
464
Tubes Still Beat People Power 192
The Fabulous Fab—What Does It Take to Support a Chip Stealing Music & Movies 466
Manufacturing Plant? 194 The Nigerian Letter, a Classic Internet Scam 469 Police Use
Where Are Data Centers Located? 207 of License Plate Scanners 479
The World’s DVD Zones 227 Cyberattacks That Challenge Governments &
Corporations 483
Nanotechnology, the Movie 233
Loren Brichter, Popularizer of “Pull to Refresh” & the Is It Fraudulent to Manipulate Sound? 485 Is It
“Cell Swipe” 257 Fraudulent to Manipulate Photos? 485 Gambling in the
RFID Tags for Security 263 New IT World 492
“Know What I’m Sayin’?”: The Uses of Speech “Bring Your Own Device” to Work: Applying Systems Analysis
Recognition Systems 268 & Design to the BYOD Trend 507
Sensors Get Data We Never Had Before 270 Stumbles on the Road to Progress: When Big Systems
Fail 514
Input & Output Together: Paving the Way for the Self-
Driving Car 275 Who Decides When Programs Are Okay to Go? The
Release Engineer 524
Dreams of 3-D Printing 290
Student Entrepreneurs Create a New App in Five Days with
Painful Technology for College Students 290 Can
“Premade Programming Lego Blocks” 536
Cellphones Cause Cancer? 292

Contents
Recording Music: From Analog Life to Digital Life 308 “Gotcha,
Thief!” & Other Uses of GPS 334
Microsoft Pays “Bug Bounties” to White-Hat Hackers
345
Too-Good-to-Be-True Deals Online 346 The Love
Bug & Other Viruses 348
Famous Worms: Klez, Conficker, & Stuxnet 348 The Weird
Experience of Identity Theft 354 The Ruggedized Tablet for
Splashes & Spills 379 The Rise of the Selfie: What Does It
Mean? 392 Pandora’s Music Genome Project 395
Using Your Xbox to Order Pizza 400
Databases Everywhere 409
How Amazon.com Used Databases to Become the
World’s Largest Online Bookstore 413
The Uses of Data Mining 427
The Brute Force of Weak AI 439
Some Interestingly Named Expert Systems 439
Using Virtual Reality & Simulation for Training,
Treatment, & Research 444
All Types of Robots 446
xiv

To the Instructor

INTRODUCTION: Not Just a Revision, a Reimagining

The tumultuous changes in the landscape of information technology over the last two
years have led us to make extensive modifications in this edition of Using Information
Technology —to do not just a revision but a remaking and reimagining of this introduc
tory computer concepts book.
In addition, because of the rise in distractions, stresses, and information overload
on students, we have made every effort to increase the readability, teachability,
and memorability of our material — using more storytelling, more headings, more
mnemonic aids.

CONTENT CHANGES IN THIS EDITION: Addressing

New Paradigms
Throughout its 18-year history, Using Information Technology has been written and
substantially revised around historic paradigm changes —in the First Edition the
impact of digital convergence, or the fusion of computers and communications; in
the Fourth Edition the new priorities of cyberspace imposed by the Internet and
World Wide Web; in the Seventh Edition the ascendancy of the “Always On” genera
tion of students, who are at ease with but not always knowledgeable about digital
technology.
In this Eleventh Edition, we address the following history-altering developments:

• The explosion of mobile computing: In the United States there are now more
smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other such portable devices than there are
people.

• The rise of “the cloud”: Moving data storage and processing from desktops and
laptops to online servers is changing the economics and availability of computing
power.

• The boom in Big Data: The growth in servers, software sophistication, and data
collection methods results in 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day.
The evolution of artificial intelligence: Supercomputers, mammoth databases, and
•
powerhouse software make AI a force that’s sure to alter nearly every field of human
endeavor.

• The acceleration in computer threats: Every day the efforts of black-hat hackers,
virus writers, and cyberwar makers threaten to sabotage our major institutions.

• The shrinking of privacy: Search companies, mobile carriers, and retailers track
To the Instructor
our Internet patterns, cellphone usage, and shopping habits to learn more and more
about us.

• The increase in government surveillance: Cyberspying by U.S. agencies, as well as

by foreign governments, challenges individual and institutional freedom and security.
The extensive content changes for this edition are described beginning on p. xx.

xv
PRESENTATION CHANGES IN THIS EDITION: Making
the Material Easier to Learn
To help students realize the valuable education they have paid for, we have done our best
to make this text practical, readable, and current by presenting information in ways that
motivate, entertain, and get quickly to the point by using the following new features:

• We teach concepts by referring to what students already know: Most students

come to this book already knowledgeable about mobile technology. In this edition,
then, we introduce new concepts by building on the student’s existing knowledge.

• We present compelling examples through storytelling: Most people seem to learn

more from stories than from having facts thrown at them. This edition offers a new
feature called TECH TALES, which provide “mini-cases,” business related and
otherwise, to illustrate concepts.

• We expand the use of headings: Our approach is to have frequent headings as

organizers. In this edition, each chapter is divided into two units, UNIT A and
UNIT B, to help students get a better grasp of the material. We’ve also added more
subheadings throughout.

• We open each chapter with an overview—a CHAPTER FORECAST: Every

chapter opens with a short summary, to give the student a clear vision of the road ahead.

MOTIVATING THE UNMOTIVATED & TEACHING

TO A DISPARITY OF BACKGROUNDS
As authors, we find information technology tremendously exciting, but we recognize that
many students take the course reluctantly. And we also recognize that many students come
to the subject with attitudes ranging from complete apathy and unfamiliarity to a high
degree of experience and technical understanding.
To address the problem of motivating the unmotivated and teaching to a disparity of
backgrounds, Using Information Technology offers unequaled treatment of the following:
1. Practicality
2. Readability
3. Currentness
4. Three-level critical thinking system
We explain these features on the following pages.

FEATURE 1: Emphasis on Practicality

This popular feature received overwhelming acceptance by both students and instructors
in past editions. Practical advice, of the sort found in computer magazines, newspaper
technology sections, and general-interest computer books, is expressed not only in the text
but also in the following features:
Experience Box
•
• Practical Action Box
• Survival Tips
To the Instructor
EXPERIENCE BOX Web Research, Term Papers, & Plagiarism
Experience Box
 Appearing at the end of each chap ter, the Experience Box has
optional
xvi

N o matter how much students

may be able to rational

ize cheating in college—for
example, trying to pass off
someone else’s term paper as their own (plagiarism)—ignorance of the
consequences is not an excuse. Most instructors announce the penalties for
cheating at the beginning of the

blocks of text. Indeed, some websites favored by instructors build a database

of papers over time so that students can’t recycle work previously handed in by
others. Special software programs, such as at CopyScape.com ,
PlagiarismChecker.
com , grammarly.com , SplaT, and academicplagiarism.com , are available for
instructors to check students’ work and for students to check their own work
before turning it in.

material that may be assigned at the

instructor’s discretion. However, stu
dents will find the subjects covered
are of immediate value.
 Examples: “Web Research, Term Papers, & Plagiarism,” “Getting Help from Tech
Support,” “How to Buy a Laptop,” and “How the Rise of the Robots Will Affect Future
Employment.”

Practical Action Box

This box consists of optional material on practi

cal matters.
Examples: “How to Be a Successful
Online Student,” “Evaluating & Sourcing
Information Found on the Web,” “Tips for
Avoiding Spy

PRACTICAL ACTION
How to Be a Successful Online Student
ware,” “Utility Programs: Specialized Programs
to Make Computing Easier,” “Social Network ing:
The Downside,” “Help in Building Your Web
Page,” “Storing Your Stuff: How Long Will
Digitized Data Last?,” “Starting Over with Your
1. Familiarize yourself with the computer and software. Be comfortable with the computer, Internet,
email, web browser, and search engine software. Use tutorials to become familiar with the software
used by your online school.
Take advantage of technology. Learn the various ways of communicating on the web. Blogging, podcast
ing, video conferencing, and chatting (discussed later

time. You may feel that taking

an online course will free up your
time for other tasks. If you are feeling
overwhelmed by other responsibilities, such as work or family obligations, then perhaps you had better
post pone your involvement. Online courses require as much and often more personal preparation time
than on-cam pus courses. Remember everything that you would nor-
Hard Drive: Erasing, Reformatting, & Reloading,” “Telecommuting &
Telework: The Virtual Workplace,” “The Consequences of Choice
Overload,” “Online Viewing & Sharing of Digital Photos,” and “Is the
Boss Watching You? Trust in the Workplace.”

Survival Tips
In the margins throughout we present utilitarian Survival Tips to aid
students’ explora tions of the infotech world.
Examples: “Broadband: Riskier for Security,” “Connection Speeds,” “
Finding Things on a Web Page or in a Web Document,” “Urban Legends &
Lies on the Inter net,” “ Social-Networking Privacy,” “Control Those
Cookies!” “New Software & Compatibility,” “What RAM for Your PC?,”
“ATMs & Fraud/Safety,” “Firewalls,” “E-Book Cautions,” “Alleviating
Info-Mania,” “Fraud Baiters,” and “What Happens to Your Smartphone
Data?”

FEATURE 2: Emphasis on Readability

& Reinforcement for Learning
We offer the following features for reinforcing student learning:

Interesting Writing—Based on Good Scholarship Where

is it written that textbooks have to be boring? Can’t a text have personality?

Survival Tip New Software &

Compatibility
Pay attention to compatibility requirements when
you obtain new software. The system requirements
for running the software will be listed on the box or
included with the down loaded information. When it
is time to update the software, you can usually do
that by pay ing a small upgrade fee to the software
manufacturer and then downloading the new ver
sion and/or obtaining a new CD/DVD.
 wiL16880_ch01_001-048.indd 7 10/1/13 1:47 PM

Actually, studies have found that textbooks written in an imaginative style signifi
cantly improve students’ ability to retain information. Both instructors and students have
commented on the distinctiveness of the writing in this book. In this edition, we have
added Tech Tales, stories or mini-cases, to illustrate concepts. We also employ a number
of journalistic devices—colorful anecdotes, short biographical sketches, and interesting
observations—to make the material as engaging as possible. In addition we use real anec
dotes and examples rather than fictionalized ones.
Finally, unlike most computer concepts books, we provide references for our
sources—see the endnotes in the back of the book. Many of these are from the year
preceding publication. We see no reason why introductory computer books shouldn’t
To the Instructor
practice good scholarship by revealing their information sources. And we see no reason
why good scholarship can’t go along with good writing—scholarship need not mean
stuffiness.

Key Terms AND Definitions Emphasized

To help readers avoid confusion about important terms and what they actually mean, we
print each key term in red bold and its definition in black boldface. Example: “ Data
xvii
consists of raw facts and figures that are processed into information. ”

ethics Tracking
Cellphone companies may be tracking your every move and compiling information about
you . . .
www.bloomberg.com/
news/2013-06-06/carriers-sell users- tracking-data-in-5-5-
billion-market.html

Material in Easily Manageable Portions

Major ideas are presented in bite-size form, with generous use of advance
organizers, bulleted lists, and new paragraphing when a new idea is
SECURITY introduced. Most sentences have been kept short, the majority not
exceeding 22–25 words in length.

“Terms & Explanations” Displayed in Easily

Reviewable Form
To help students review the technical terms and vocabulary used in
more info! computing, we have created at the end of every chapter a section titled
“Terms & Explanations,” which not only gives the meaning of every key
GPS & Cellphone term introduced in the chapter but also explains why it is important. See,
for example, pages 239, 296, and 359.

Emphasis throughout on Ethics

See Ethics examples on pages 38, 81, 96,146, 236, 264, 344, and 353.
Many texts discuss ethics in isolation, usually in one of the final chapters.
We believe this topic is too important to be treated last or lightly, and users
have agreed. Thus, we cover ethical matters throughout the book, as
indicated by the special icon shown at left. Example: We discuss such all-
important questions as online plagiarism, privacy, com puter crime, and
netiquette.

Emphasis throughout on Security

See Security icons on pages 38, 96, 120, 229, 230, 263, 271, 275, 315, 334,
343, 347, 353, and 357. In the post 9-11 era, security concerns are of
gravest importance. Although we devote several pages (in Chapters 2, 6,
and 9) to security matters, we also reinforce student aware ness by
highlighting with page-margin Security icons instances of security-
related material throughout the book. Example: In one case, we use the
special icon shown at left to highlight the advice that one should pretend
that every email message one sends “is a postcard that can be read by
anyone.”

“More Info!” Icons Help Students Find Their Own

Answers to Questions
In addition, our “More Info!” feature encourages students to get
actively involved in the material.
Examples: “Finding Wi-Fi Hot Spots,” “Do You Need to Know HTML to
Build a Web site?,” “Blog Search Engines,” “Some Online Communities,”
“Links to Security Software,” and “Where to Learn More about Freeware
& Shareware.”

Eight Timelines to Provide Historical Perspective

See timelines beginning on pages 16, 50, 164, 194, 254, 304, 416, and 532.
Some instructors like to see coverage of the history of computing. Not
wishing to add greatly to the length of the book, we decided on a student-
friendly approach: the presentation of eight pictorial timelines showing
the most significant historical IT events. These timelines, which occur in
most chapters, appear along the bottom page area. (See the example at the
bottom of this page.) Each timeline repeats certain “benchmark”
1984
1990
1994
1998
2000
2001
2002
2003
To the Instructor
xviii
Apple
Macintosh; first
personal laser
printer
Laptops become
very
popular
Apple and IBM
introduce PCs with
full-motion video
built
in; wireless data
transmission for
small portable
computers; first
web browser
invented
PayPal is founded
The “Y2K”
nonproblem; the
first U.S.
presidential
webcast
Dell computers
becomes the
largest PC maker
Friendster
Facebook;
MySpace
events to keep students oriented, but each one is modified to feature the landmark dis
coveries and inventions appropriate to the different chapter material. Examples: In
Chapter 3 on software, the timeline features innovations in operating systems. In Chapter 6
on communications, the timeline highlights innovations in data transmission.

FEATURE 3: Currentness
Reviewers have applauded previous editions of UIT for being more up to date than other
texts. For example, we have traditionally ended many chapters with a forward-looking
section that offers a preview of technologies to come—some of which are realized even as
students are using the book.
Among the new topics and terms covered in this edition are: Accelerated Graphics
Port (ACP) bus, air mouse, AMOS, Apple iCloud, apps, Big Data, Bootcamp, booting from
the cloud, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, bug bounty, business-to-consumer (B2C)
commerce, Chrome, Chrome OS, Chromebook, cloud-based apps, computational AI, con
densed keyboards, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) commerce, conventional AI, convertible
tablets, cyberattacks, Dashboard, data centers, Detrx keyboard, distributed denial of ser
vice, drones, email bombs, embedded Linux OS, EMV cards, eSATA ports, ethical hackers,
ExpressCards, FireWire bus, FISA court, Google Apps, Google Glass, heuristics, hybrid
tablets/PCs, Instagram, iPhone 5, iPhone iOS, KALC keyboard, Kinect, Leap Motion, LTE
telecommunication standards, machine learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs),
mesh networks, metadata, Microsoft Xbox One, Mountain Lion, Mozilla Firefox OS, multi
touch screens, National Security Agency (NSA), Nintendo Wii U, octa-core processors, online
dating, passphrases, personal browser, Pinterest, Pokki, power-line network, predictive
search apps, robots grouped by application, robots grouped by locomotion, Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board, self-driving cars, selfies, semantic markup, showroom
ing, slate tablets, Snapkeys Si, Sony PlayStation 4, Spotlight, Surface tablet, T3 lines, T4
lines, T5 lines, texting, threaded discussion, tree networks, trolls, wearable technology,
Web 1.0, Web 3.0, Web app, WiMax, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows
RT, Windows Server 2012, and wireless Internet service provider (WISP).
Material has also been updated on the following: Android, artificial intelligence (AI),
cellphone malware, cloud computing, cyberwarfare, data collection on consumers by
business, e-readers, gesture interface, government spying, image-capture devices, image
compression technology, improved digital cameras, Internet usage, Mac OS X, malware,
metadata mining, mobile-payment services, nanotechnology, online (distance) learning,
passwords, privacy, 3-D printers, and tablets.
A complete update of the chapter-by-chapter changes from the previous edition
begins on p. xx.

FEATURE 4: Three-Level System to Help Students

Think Critically about Information Technology
This feature has been well received. More instructors are familiar with Benjamin Bloom’s
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, describing a hierarchy of six critical-thinking skills:
(a) two lower-order skills— memorization and comprehension —and (b) four higher-order
skills— application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Drawing on our experience in
writing books to guide students to college success, we have implemented Bloom’s ideas in
a three-stage pedagogical system, using the following hierarchical approach in the Chapter
Review at the end of every chapter:

To the Instructor
Stage 1 Learning—Memorization: “I Can Recognize
and Recall Information”
Using self-test questions, multiple-choice questions, and true-false questions, we enable
students to test how well they recall basic terms and concepts.

Stage 2 Learning—Comprehension: “I Can Recall Information

 in My Own Terms and Explain It to a Friend”
xix
Using open-ended, short-answer questions, we enable students to re-express terms and
concepts in their own words.
Stage 3 Learning—Applying, Analyzing, Synthesizing,
Evaluating: “I Can Apply What I’ve Learned, Relate These
Ideas to Other Concepts, Build on Other Knowledge, and Use
All These Thinking Skills to Form a Judgment”
In this part of the Chapter Review, we ask students to put the ideas into effect using the
activities described. The purpose is to help students take possession of the ideas, make
them their own, and apply them realistically to their own ideas. Our web exercises are
also intended to spur discussion in classroom and other contexts.
Examples: “Using Text Messaging in Emergencies,” “What’s Wrong with Using Super
market Loyalty Cards?,” and “Are You in the Homeland Security Database?”

RESOURCES FOR INSTRUCTORS

Online Learning Center
The Online Learning Center (www.mhhe.com/uit11e) is designed to provide students
with additional learning opportunities and instructors with additional teaching tools. For
instructors, the website includes PowerPoint presentations for each chapter. For the conve
nience of instructors, all the following resources are available for download.
To help maintain high quality in the supplements, the textbook authors have per
sonally updated the Instructor’s Manual, Testbank, and PowerPoint presentation.

Instructor’s Manual
The electronic Instructor’s Manual, which is available as part of the Instructor’s Resource
Kit, helps instructors create effective lectures. The Instructor’s Manual is easy to navigate
and simple to understand. Each chapter contains a chapter overview, lecture outline, teach
ing tips, additional information, and answers to end-of-chapter questions and exercises.

Testbank
The format of the Testbank allows instructors to effectively pinpoint areas of content
within each chapter on which to test students. The test questions include learning difficulty
level, answers, and text page numbers, as well as the learning objective head under which
the question content falls and the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy that applies to the question.

EZ Test
McGraw-Hill’s EZ Test is a flexible and easy-to-use electronic testing program. The pro
gram allows instructors to create tests from book-specific items. It accommodates a wide
range of question types, and instructors may add their own questions. Multiple versions
of the test can be created and any test can be exported for use with course management
systems such as WebCT, BlackBoard, or PageOut. EZ Test Online is a new service and
gives you a place to easily administer your EZ Test–created exams and quizzes online. The
program is available for Windows and Macintosh environments.

PowerPoint Presentation
The PowerPoint presentation includes material that expands on main topics from the text,
allowing instructors to create engaging classroom sessions. Each chapter’s presentation
includes helpful illustrations that emphasize important concepts.

To the Instructor
CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER CHANGES FROM
THE PREVIOUS EDITION
 1. Introduction to Information Technology: The Future Now
UNIT 1A: THE MOBILE WORLD, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, & YOUR LIFE.
Chapter introduction and Section 1.1 repurposed to stress importance of mobile com
puting. Smartphones, tablet computers, and social networks introduced. Concept of
xx
database introduced. Material updated on high-paying salaries and attractiveness of IT
careers. N ew material added: “Starting Up Your Own Venture,” social media in job
hunting, and technology in your personal life, including online dating sites. Obsolete
chart deleted on technology areas that people devote their time to. Subsections deleted on
leisure and on college students and the e-world.
UNIT 1B: THE BASICS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. Former Section 1.1,
“The Practical User,” now Section 1.3. Material updated on fastest supercomputers. New
material added on mobile devices, Big Data, machine learning, algorithms, and over
view of artificial intelligence.
Tech Tales added: “The Rise of Mobile Computing: The Getting-Smarter Smartphone,”
“Technology in Education: Adjusting Instructor Presentations to the Students,” “New
Telemedicine: The Doctor Will See You Now—Right Now,” “What Apps Do You Really
Need?,” and “Artificial Intelligence: The Use of Algorithms to Create a Hit Song.”

2. The Internet & the World Wide Web: Exploring Cyberspace

UNIT 2A: THE INTERNET & THE WEB. New material on T4, T5 lines, username and
password, desktop browsers. Chrome added to bookmarks discussion. New material
on wikis and Wikipedia added under smart web searching. Obsolete material deleted
about desktop search engines.
UNIT 2B: THE RICHES & RISKS OF INTERNET USE. Reorganization of material and
new material added on email, instant messaging, and other ways of communicating over
the Internet and on discussion groups and FTP. Obsolete material deleted on listservs. New
material added to e-commerce discussion, B2C, C2C, showrooming. Under Web 2.0,
new material on Web 1.0 and other data. Practical Action box, “Social Networking: The
Downside,” repurposed and new material added. New section added: “Malware: The
Viciousness of Viruses,” with introduction of antivirus software. New section added,
“Passwords,” with practical suggestions.
Tech Tales added: “How a World-Shaking Technology Came About: Tim Berners-Lee
Invents the World Wide Web,” “The Continuing Development of Browsers: The War for
Smartphones & Tablets,” “Web Imaging & Aerial Mapping: Google Earth,” “Animation:
Making of ‘Fetch,’ a Mobile Game,” “The Rise of the Blogosphere: ‘Writing Out Loud,’”
“Changing Retail Practices: The Fight against ‘Showrooming,’” and “How Difficult It Is
to Keep Your Emails & Texts Private.”

3. Software: Tools for Productivity & Creativity

UNIT 3A: SYSTEM SOFTWARE: THE POWER BEHIND THE POWER. Obsolete intro
ductory material replaced with discussion of cloud computing and Google Apps. Imme
diate distinction made between application and system software. Subsection added,
“Booting from the Cloud.” Under Mac OS, material added about OS X Lion. Under
Microsoft Windows, material added on different types of Windows 8, as well as 8.1.
Excess material on Linux deleted. Embedded operating systems discussion expanded
on smartphone OSs. Panel 3.19 added on market share of top smartphone OSs.
UNIT 3B: APPLICATION SOFTWARE: GETTING STARTED. Discussion of sources of
software reorganized for clarity. New material and subhead added, “Web Application”
software. Discussion of types of files moved from end of chapter to here under “3.6 Data
Files & Program Files.” Section on importing and exporting moved to later in this section.
Section on compression moved here from end of chapter. New Section 3.10, “Software
Suites & Integrated Packages,” with material moved from later in chapter on software
suites and integrated suites and new material added on productivity suites.
Tech Tales added: “The War for Dominance in Mobile Operating Systems,” “New
To the Instructor
Technology to Replace the Mouse: The Gesture Interface,” “China Adopts Linux as Its
National Standard,” “Software Evolution: 40 Years of Blasting Space Aliens—The Incred
ible Growth in Videogames,” and “Free Software for Cash-Strapped Students.”

4. Hardware: The CPU & Storage—The Source

of Computing Power
UNIT 4A: PROCESSING: THE SYSTEM UNIT, MICROPROCESSORS, & MAIN MEM
xxi
ORY. Obsolete introduction replaced with material about sales plummeting on PCs
compared to mobile devices. Obsolete illustration material deleted on making of a chip.
Material reorganized under “Miniaturization Leads to Mobility.” New section “The
System Unit,” with new material about desktop PC, laptop, notebook, tablet, and
handheld system units. Obsolete material on advertisement for a PC deleted. Material
reorganized for better comprehension under heading, “4.3 Inside the System Unit: Power
Supply, Motherboard, & Microprocessors.” Under multicore processors, material added
on octa-core processors. Material added on processors for data centers. Recast mate
rial on processing speed into section, “The System Clock & Processing Speeds.” Old mate
rial on MIPS, flops, and milliseconds deleted. Old head about more on the system unit
retitled “The Central Processing Unit & the Machine Cycle,” and material resequenced
so word size discussed later. New section created, “4.5 Memory,” and material reorga
nized and added to. Material added on MRAM; material deleted on SDRAM and DDR
SDRAM. Material deleted on interleaving, bursting, pipelining, superscalar architecture,
and hyperthreading. Old head about ports and cables retitled “4.6 Expansion Cards, Bus
Lines, & Ports,” with new material added.
UNIT 4B: SECONDARY STORAGE. Obsolete coverage of magnetic tape deleted. New
material added on perpendicular recording technology. Material on flash memory and
solid-state memory moved ahead of smart cards, and term flash memory drive replaced
by USB flash drive. LaserCard added under discussion of smartcards. Obsolete material
on optical memory cards deleted. Section on online secondary storage recast as “Cloud
Storage” and new material added. Under “4.8 Future Developments in Processing &
Storage,” obsolete introductory material deleted, and new material added throughout.
Obsolete material deleted on higher-density disks, and new material added on image
compression technology.
Tech Tales added: “Vacuum Tubes Still Beat People Power,” “The Fabulous Fab—
What Does It Take to Support a Chip Manufacturing Plant?,” “Where Are Data Centers
Located?,” “The World’s DVD Zones,” and “Nanotechnology, the Movie.”

5. Hardware: Input & Output—Taking Charge of Computing

& Communications
UNIT 5A: INPUT HARDWARE. Obsolete material on ATMs and kiosks deleted. New mate
rial added on wearable technology, including Google’s Glass. Under “5.1 Keyboards,”
new terms introduced—enhanced keyboards, Ketrix, Snapkey Si, CALC. Tactile
keyboards distinguished from touch screen, wired from wireless (infrared, radio fre
quency) . In discussion of terminals, Internet terminals deleted and ATMs, POS terminals,
and mobile data terminals added. Under “5.2 Pointing Devices,” wireless mouse and
air mouse added. Under variations of the mouse, touch screen deleted and pointing stick
added; touch screen made a separate category. New heading created, “5.3 Source Data
Entry Devices,” including scanners, bar-code readers, RFID tags, mark recognition and
character recognition devices, audio-input devices, speech-recognition systems, webcams
and video-input cards, digital cameras, sensors, and biometric input devices. Discussion
of RFID moved to follow bar-code discussion. Obsolete material on fax machines deleted.
New section added, “Image-Capture Devices,” with discussion of digital cameras and
webcams. Audio-input devices now follows image-capture discussion. Heading on human
biology input devices now reads “Biometric-Input Devices.” Futuristic material moved
from end of chapter to new section, “5.4 The Future of Input,” and new material added
under input from remote locations, on source data automation, speech recognition,
touch and gesture recognition, pattern-recognition and biometric devices, and brain
wave devices; material added on designs that imitate the physical world.
UNIT 5B: OUTPUT HARDWARE. Obsolete introductory material deleted. Under “5.5
To the Instructor
Softcopy Output: Display Screens,” features of screens are described first, including size
and aspect ratio, screen clarity with refresh rate, then types of screens, including flat-panel
displays (both passive and active matrix), new material on plasma display, and CRT;
new material on multiple screens. New section heading, “5.6 Hardcopy Output: Print
ers.” New section heading, “5.8 The Future of Output,” which includes the principal heads
“More Unusual Forms of Output,” with added material; “More Data Used in Output,”
including coverage of Big Data; and “More Realistic Output,” with new coverage on
xxii
microreplication, printers using reduced ink, more realistic animation, and latest on
three-dimensional printing. New material added on health and ergonomics. Some
obsolete material deleted and new material added to Experience Box, “Good Habits:
Protecting Your Computer System, Your Data, & Your Health.”
Tech Tales added: “Loren Brichter, Popularizer of ‘Pull to Refresh’ & the ‘Cell Swipe,’”
“RFID Tags for Security,” “‘Know What I’m Sayin’?,’ The Uses of Speech-Recognition
Systems,” “Sensors Get Data We Never Had Before,” “Input & Output Together: Paving
the Way for the Self-Driving Car,” “Dreams of 3-D Printing,” “Painful Technology for Col
lege Students,” and “Can Cellphones Cause Cancer?”

6. Communications, Networks, & Cyberthreats:

The Wired & Wireless World
UNIT 6A: NETWORKS & WIRED & WIRELESS MEDIA. Obsolete introductory mate
rial deleted. Four ways of accessing the Internet identified: telephone modem, high-speed
phone lines, cable modem, and wireless modem. Disadvantages of networks deleted for
space reasons. Under LANS, wireless LAN (WLAN) added as one type of LAN. Discus
sion reduced of home area network, home automation network, garden area network, and
personal area networks, now made examples of LANs. Material reorganized to contrast
client-server and peer to peer. Material reorganized as “Intranets, Extranets, VPNs, & Fire
walls”; material on firewalls moved here from late in chapter. Under “Switches,” definition
modified and material reduced. Under “Network Topologies,” material on tree network
and mesh network topologies added. Ethernet redefined and description edited for clar
ity. Under “6.3 Wired Communications Media,” subheads added on “Phone Line Network”
(instead of HomePNA) and “Power Line Network” (instead of HomePlug). Under discus
sion of 4G, material added on LTE. Technical discussion of Wi-Fi reduced for readability
and Wi-Fi standards summarized in a table (Panel 6.16); WiMax added. Practical Action
box moved from end of section, “Virtual Meetings: Linking Up Electronically.”
UNIT 6B: CYBERTHREATS, SECURITY, & PRIVACY ISSUES. Unit considerably
expanded to cover new issues. Material added on BYOD (bring your own device) policy.
Practical Action box deleted, “WikiLeaks & DDoS.” Section 6.5 retitled and new mate
rial added, “6.5 Cyberintruders: Trolls, Spies, Hackers, & Thieves.” Cyberattacks
introduced and defined. Discussion of hackers moved here from later in the chapter,
with new subheads, “Malicious Hackers,” “Benign Hackers,” and “Benevolent Hackers.”
Material on “Thieves” moved here from Chapter 9. Section formerly on cyberthreats reor
ganized and now titled “Section 6.6 Cyberattacks & Malware,” with subheads “Denial
of- Service Attacks,” “Viruses,” “Worms,” “Trojan Horses,” “Rootkits & Backdoors,”
“Blended Threats,” “Zombies,” “Ransomware,” “Time, Logic, & Email Bombs,” and
“Phone Malware.” Former section on how malware is spread and Practical Action box
“Ways to Minimize Virus Attacks” material relocated to Chapter 2. Practical Action box
“How to Deal with Passwords” deleted and material relocated to Chapter 2. New section
created with material from Chapter 8, “6.7 Concerns about Theft,” with principal head
ings “The Threat to Privacy” and “Identity Theft.” Definition of privacy added and sub
heads “Name Migration,” “Résumé Rustling & Online Snooping,” “Government Prying
& Spying.” Under identity theft appears material from Chapter 8. Experience Box added,
“Guarding Your Privacy & Preventing Your Identity from Getting Stolen,” using old mate
rial from Chapter 8.
Tech Tales added: “Recording Music: From Analog Life to Digital Life,” “‘Gotcha,
Thief!’ & Other Uses of GPS,” “Microsoft Pays ‘Bug Bounties’ to White-Hat Hackers,”
“Too-Good-to-Be-True Deals Online,” “The Love Bug & Other Viruses,” “Famous Worms:
Klez, Conficker, & Stuxnet,” and “The Weird Experience of Identity Theft.”
To the Instructor
7. Personal Technology: The Future Is You
UNIT 7A: PERSONAL DEVICES FOR IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY AT SCHOOL &
WORK. Chapter sections resequenced: “7.1 Convergence, Portability, & Personalization,”
“7.2 Smartphones,” “7.3 Tablets & E-Readers,” “7.4 Portable Media Players.” Obsolete
introductory material deleted and replaced. In-text material converted to Practical Action
box, “The Consequences of Choice Overload.” Material on multitasking moved to Sec
xxiii
tion 7.3. Under “7.2 Smartphones: More Than Talk,” principal headings are “How Do
Cellphones & Smartphones Differ?” with new material; “How a Mobile Phone Works,”
and “Using Mobile Phones in College.” New material on mobile phone OSs, apps, display
areas, keyboards and voice commands, output, and GPS technology. Obsolete material
deleted on email, Internet access, QR codes, radio, and music. New material on benefits
and drawbacks of mobile phones in college. Under “7.3 Tablets & E-Readers,” two tech
nologies discussed in one section, with new material on tablet types and OSs. Earlier
material on multitasking from first section made into Practical Action box, “Multitasking—
Good for Productivity?” New material added to discussion of how an e-reader works and
drawbacks of e-readers . Under “7.4 Portable Media Players,” new material distinguishing
among uses of music players, media players, and smartphones. Under portable media
players, subheads reorganized: “Storage Methods” (flash memory drive and hard-disk
drive), “Sampling Rate,” “Transferring Files,” “Battery Life,” “Display Screens,” “Other
Features,” and “MP3 in Your Car.”
UNIT 7B: PERSONAL DEVICES FOR ENRICHING LEISURE & LIFE. Chapter
sections resequenced: “7.5 Digital Cameras,” “7.6 High-Tech Radio,” “7.7 Digital
Television,” “7.8 Videogame Systems.” Under digital cameras, discussion of storage
expanded. Material added to Practical Action box, “Online Viewing & Sharing of Digital
Photos.” Under societal effects of digital cameras, subheads and new material added
about photos no longer just of special events and whether photo gazing gives skewed
impressions of others. Under “7.8 Videogame Systems,” new material added. Some new
material added to Experience Box, “The ‘Always On’ Generation.”
Tech Tales added: “The Ruggedized Tablet for Splashes & Spills,” “The Rise of the
Selfie: What Does It Mean?,” “Pandora’s Music Genome Project,” and “Using Your Xbox
to Order Pizza.”

8. The Era of Big Data: Databases, Information Systems,

& Artificial Intelligence
UNIT 8A: FILES & DATABASES. Obsolete introductory material deleted. New mate
rial added about Big Data. Under discussion of data dictionary, metadata added and
defined. Under discussion of data mining, some obsolete in-text examples deleted.
UNIT 8B: BIG DATA, INFORMATION SYSTEMS, & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Unit considerably expanded to cover new issues. New introductory material to
distinguish between data mining and Big Data. Old section, “8.5 Databases & the
Digital Economy,” repurposed as “8.5 The Evolving World of Big Data,” with new mate
rial added. Old material on e-commerce either moved to Chapter 2 or deleted. New prin
cipal head added, “Three Implications of Big Data,” with new material. New principal
head added, “The Uses of Big Data,” with new material and subsection heads, “Big Data
in Medicine: Using Varieties of Old & New Data,” “Smarter Junk Mail: Refining Mea
surement,” “Netflix’s Original TV Programming: Making Better Management Decisions.”
Artificial intelligence redefined and new material and principal head added, “Con
ventional AI versus Computational Intelligence,” with subheads, “Conventional AI:
Based on Machine Learning” and “Computational Intelligence: Based on Heuristics,” with
machine learning and heuristics defined and discussed. Discussion of material from
later in the chapter moved here under principal head “Weak AI versus Strong AI.” Main
areas of AI reorganized and discussed in following order: expert systems, natural language
processing, intelligent agents, pattern recognition, virtual reality and simulation devices,
robotics, fuzzy logic, and neural networks, followed by discussion of artificial life. Under
 discussion of robotics, new material and subheads added, “Robots Grouped by Loco
motion System” and “Robots Grouped by Application.” New principal section added,
“Neural Networks,” using material formerly part of Panel 8.18, which now contains only
To the Instructor
genetic algorithms and cyborgs as examples of two other types of AI. Existing text material
put beneath new section head, “8.8 Artificial Life, the Turing Test, & the Singularity.” Old
section “8.8 Databases: Concerns about Privacy & Identity Theft” deleted, and its material
redistributed to Chapters 6 and 9. Old Experience Box, “Preventing Your Identity from Get
ting Stolen,” deleted, and its contents moved to Chapter 6. New Experience Box added,
“How the Rise of Robotics Will Affect Future Employment,” with new material.

xxiv
Tech Tales added: “Databases Everywhere,” “How Amazon.com Used Databases to
Become the World’s Largest Online Bookstore,” “The Uses of Data Mining,” “The Brute
Force of Weak AI,” “Some Interestingly Named Expert Systems,” “Using Virtual Reality
& Simulation for Training, Treatment, & Research,” “All Types of Robots,” “Applying
Fuzzy Logic to Elevators,” and “A Scene from the Turing Test.”

9. The Challenges of the Digital Age: Society & Information

Technology Today
UNIT 9A: SECURITY, PRIVACY, & SURVEILLANCE CONCERNS. Unit considerably
expanded to cover new issues. Old section “9.1 Truth Issues” now section “9.4
Truth Issues” in Unit 9B. In new “9.1 Security Issues,” obsolete introductory material
deleted; new material added on predictive apps in relation to privacy issues, and
principal headings reorganized to combine two sections, on errors and accidents and
on natural hazards, as “Errors, Accidents, & Natural Hazards.” Under discussion of
theft of hardware, in-text bulleted list converted to Panel 9.2, “Keeping your mobile
devices safe.” New material added to discussion of theft of software. Material on
theft of online music and movies converted to a subsection, “Theft of Intellectual Prop
erty,” with extra material added. Material in old section on “Taking Over Your PC:
Zombies, Botnets, & Blackmail” moved to Chapter 6. Under discussion of crimes of
malice, new material on attacks on infrastructure added to attacks on power-control
systems. Under discussion of attacks on the Internet, old material on border gateway
protocol replaced with new material. Material in old section “Computer Criminals”
deleted here and moved to Chapter 6. Old section “9.3 Security Safeguards” now
Section 9.2. Under discussion of passwords, new material added on saving pass
words in software with encrypted file and in using fingerprint readers for master
passwords. Under discussion of physical traits, material on biometric devices moved
here from Chapter 6. Under discussion of encryption, lots of text discussion moved to
considerations of surveillance later in the chapter. New section added, “9.3 Privacy &
Surveillance: Data Collectors & Spies,” beginning with discussion of federal privacy
laws, moved here from Chapter 8. Main threats to privacy listed under principal heads
“Business & Cyberspying,” “Government & Cyberspying,” and “Spying, Hacking, &
Cyberwarfare by Foreign Governments & Groups.” Under “Business & Cyberspying,”
new material under new subheads, “How Businesses Obtain & Use Data about
Us” and “Who Owns Your Data & What Are Your Rights?” Under “Government
& Cyberspying,” some old material from Chapter 8 and new material appears under
subheads “Local Police Data Collection,” “A National Identity Card?,” “The
National Security Agency: The Rise of the Surveillance State?” (covering NSA,
FBI, FISA court, secret mining of metadata), and “Drones: Snooping from the
Skies.” Under “Spying, Hacking, & Cyberwarfare by Foreign Governments & Groups,”
mostly new material under subheads “Cyberspying by Foreign—& the U.S.—
Governments” and “Cyberattacks & Cyberwarfare.”
UNIT 9B: OTHER SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, & POLITICAL ISSUES. New introduc
tory material on technology as disrupter of nearly everything. New section “9.4 Truth
Issues: Manipulating Digital Data” was formerly Section 9.1. New Section “9.5 Quality
of-Life Issues: The Environment, Mental Health, Child Protection, & the Workplace” was
 formerly Section 9.4. Under discussion of stress, new material added about effect of
mobile devices. Discussion of online sexual predators reduced and replaced with new
material under new subhead, “Sexting.”
Tech Tales added: “How Slow Perceptions Lead to Errors: Texting While Driving,”
To the Instructor
“Glitches in the System: How Electrical & Mechanical Problems Can Make Computers
Fail,” “The Risks of Natural Hazards: How Bad Can It Get?,” “Stealing Music & Movies,”
“The Nigerian Letter, a Classic Internet Scam,” “Police Use of License Plate
Scanners,” “Cyberattacks That Challenge Governments & Corporations,” “Is It Fraudulent
to Manipulate Sound?,” “Is It Fraudulent to Manipulate Photos?,” and “Gambling in the New
IT World.”

xxv
10. Building Systems & Applications: Software Development,
Programming, & Languages
UNIT 10A: SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT & PROGRAMMING. Introductory material
replaced by new material on how learning systems development and programming
can be a great career booster. Under “10.1 Systems Development & the Life Cycle of a
Software Project,” introductory material added on creation of apps. New material:
Developing a businesswide plan to utilize mobile devices is applied to the six phases of
systems development.
UNIT 10B: PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. New introductory material on
software developers being in explosive demand.
Tech Tales added: “‘Bring Your Own Device’ to Work: Applying Systems Analysis
& Design to the BYOD Trend,” “Stumbles on the Road to Progress: When Big Systems
Fail,” “Who Decides When Programs Are Okay to Go? The Release Engineer,” and
“Student Entrepreneurs Create a New App in Five Days with ‘Premade Programming
Lego Blocks.’”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has only two names on its title page, but we are extraordinarily grateful for the
many others who have been important contributors to its development. First, we wish to
thank our brand manager, Wyatt Morris, and our development editor, Alan Palmer, for
their help in rolling out this edition. Thanks also go to our marketing champion, Tiffany
Russell, and to Jean Starr, our content project manager. We also thank Kevin White and
Thuan Vinh for their media and digital support.
Outside McGraw-Hill we want to state our appreciation for the contributions of Judy
Mason, our San Francisco Bay Area photo researcher, whose history with us goes back
many, many years. We also thank Chet Gottfried, copyeditor; Mary Carole Hollingsworth,
Georgia Perimeter College, and Beverly Swisshelm, Cumberland University, technical
readers of the revised manuscript; Sharon O’Donnell, our excellent proofreader; and
James Minkin, our stalwart and sensitive indexer.
Finally, we are grateful to the following reviewers for helping to make this the most
market-driven book possible.

Olga Blinova Mary Carole Hollingsworth

Hudson County Community College Georgia Perimeter College
Anthony Cameron Mark Jackson
Fayetteville Technical Community College Columbus State Community College
Paulette Comet
Acknowledgments
Community College of Baltimore County Donna Lohn
Bernice Eng Lakeland Community College
Brookdale Community College Robert Myers
John Enomoto Florida State University
East Los Angeles College Brenda Nickel
Rachelle Hall Moraine Park Technical College
Glendale Community College Joanne Patti
Community College of Philadelphia Greg Pauley
Moberly Area Community College Barbara Purvis
Centura College
Candice Spangler
Columbus State Community College Beverly Swisshelm
Cumberland University
Perry Tonni
Lakeland Community College
David Trimble
Park University
Charles Whealton
Delaware Technical Community College Sophia Wilberscheid
Indian River State College
Mary Williams
University of Akron
 xxvi
Reviewers & Other Participants in Previous Editions
We are grateful for the magnificent help over the past 18 years from all the instructors
who have given us the benefit of their opinion, as follows:

Nancy Alderdice Charles Brown

Murray State University Plymouth State College
Margaret Allison Bidi Bruno
University of Texas–Pan American Angela Amin Portland Community College
Great Lakes Junior College David Burris
Leon Amstutz Sam Houston State University
Taylor University Jeff Butterfield
Sharon Anderson University of Idaho
Western Iowa Tech J. Wesley Cain
Valerie Anderson City University, Bellevue
Marymount College Patrick Callan
Hashem Anwari Concordia University
Northern Virginia Community College– Loudoun Campus Anthony Cameron
Connie Aragon Fayetteville Technical Community College
Seattle Central Community College Tahir Azia Judy Cameron
Long Beach City College Spokane Community College
Bonnie Bailey Ralph Caputo
Morehead State University Manhattan College
Don Bailey Robert Caruso
Plymouth State University Santa Rosa Junior College
David Brent Bandy Joe Chambers
University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh Robert L. Barber Triton College
Lane Community College Kris Chandler
Pikes Peak Community College
Vic Barbow
Purdue University William Chandler
University of Southern Colorado
Robert Barrett
Indiana University and Purdue University at Fort Wayne John Chenoweth
East Tennessee State University
Anthony Baxter
University of Kentucky Ashraful Chowdhury
Dekalb College
Gigi Beaton
Tyler Junior College Erline Cocke
Northwest Mississippi Community College
Virginia Bender
William Rainey Harper College Hossein Bidgoli
California State University–Bakersfield Warren Boe
University of Iowa
Beverly Bohn
Park University
Randall Bower
Iowa State University
Russell Breslauer
Chabot College
Bob Bretz
Western Kentucky University
William C. Brough
University of Texas–Pan American
Phyllis Broughton
Pitt Community College
 Robert Coleman
Acknowledgments Pima County Community College
Jennifer Cohen
Southwest Florida College Paulette Comet
Community College of Baltimore

xxvii

McFadyen Siena College

Acknowledgments
Ronald E. Conway Massachusetts Bay Community College Jami Glen Coulthard
Bowling Green State University Helen Corrigan- Cotler Okanagan University
Dale Craig East Los Angeles College David German
Fullerton College Nancy Jo Evans Cerro Coso Community College
Robert Crandall Indiana University–Purdue University Ray Candace Gerrod
Denver Business School Fanselau Red Rocks Community College
Hiram Crawford American River College Bish Ghosh
Olive Harvey College Metropolitan State College, Denver Julie Giles
Pat Fenton
Thad Crews West Valley College DeVry Institute of Technology
Western Kentucky University Frank Gillespie
Eleanor Flanigan
Martin Cronlund Montclair State University University of Georgia
Anne Arundel Community College Rebecca Mindy Glander
Ken Frizane
Cunningham North Metro Technical College
Oakton Community College
Arkansas Technical University Jim Dartt James Frost Myron Goldberg
Idaho State University Pace University
San Diego Mesa College
Susan Fry Dwight Graham
Joseph DeLibro
Boise State University Prairie State College
Arizona State University
Bob Fulkerth Bob Grill
Edouard Desautels
Golden Gate University College of Alameda
University of Wisconsin–Madison William
Susan Fuschetto Fillmore Guinn
Dorin
Cerritos College Odessa College
Indiana University–Northwest
Janos Fustos Norman P. Hahn
Maryan Dorn Thomas Nelson Community College Sallyann
Metropolitan State College
Southern Illinois University Hanson
Yaping Gao
Patti Dreven College of Mount St. Joseph Mercer County Community College Dorothy G.
Community College of Southern Nevada John
Enrique Garcia Harman
Durham Laredo Community College Tarrant County College, Northeast Campus
Fort Hays State University JoAnn Garver Debra Harper
Laura A. Eakins University of Akron Montgomery County Community College– North
East Carolina University Jill Gebelt Harris
Bonita Ellis Salt Lake Community College Albert Harris
Wright City College Charles Geigner Appalachian State University
John Enomoto Illinois State University

xxviii
Jan Harris Georgia Perimeter College
Lewis & Clark Community College Michael Hasset Stan Honacki
Fort Hays State University Moraine Valley Community College Wayne Horn
Carson Haury Pensacola Junior College
Central Oregon Community College Richard Hauser Tom Hrubec
East Carolina University Waubonsee Community College Jerry Humphrey
Cheryl R. Heemstra Tulsa Junior College
Anne Arundel Community College Julie Heine Christopher Hundhausen
Southern Oregon State College University of Oregon
Richard Hewer Alan Iliff
Ferris State University North Park College
Marilyn Hibbert Washington James
Salt Lake Community College Collin County Community College–Plano John Jansma
Ron Higgins Palo Alto College
Grand Rapids Community College Martin Hochhauser Jim Johnson
Dutchess Community College Valencia Community College
Don Hoggan Linda Johnsonius
Solano Community College Murray State University
James D. Holland Julie Jordahl
Okaloosa-Waltoon Community College Marie Carole Hollingsworth Rock Valley College
Laleh Kalantari
Western Illinois University Acknowledgments
Jan Karasz Gina Long
Cameron University Southwestern Community College
Linda Kavanaugh Varga John Longstreet
Robert Morris University Harold Washington College
Hak Joon Kim Paul Lou
Southern Connecticut State University Diablo Valley College
Jorene Kirkland
Amarillo College
Linda Kliston
Broward College–North
Paul Koester
Tarrant County College
Kurt W. Kominek
Northeast State Community College
Shawn Krest
Genesee Community College
Victor Lafrenz
Mohawk Valley Community College
Jackie Althea Lamoureux
Central New Mexico Community College
Sheila Lancaster
Gadsden State Community College
David Lee Largent
Ball State University
Dana Lasher
North Carolina State University
Dawn D. Laux
Purdue University–West Lafayette
Stephen Leach
Florida State University
Paul Leidig
Grand Valley State University
Mary Levesque
University of Nebraska
Andrew Levin
Delaware Valley College
Chang-Yang Lin
Eastern Kentucky University
Janet D. Lindner
Midlands Technical College
Nicholas Lindquist
Arizona State University
Donna Lohn
Lakeland Community College

xxix
 Veronica F. McGowan Salt Lake Community College
Acknowledgments Delaware Valley College
Beata Lovelace Wanda Nolden
Pulaski Technical College Todd McLeod Delgado Community College
Fresno City College E. Gladys Norman
Pamela Luckett
Barry University Curtis Meadow Linn-Benton Community College George
University of Maine Novotny
Deborah Ludford
Glendale Community College Evelyn Lulis Jennifer Merritt Ferris State University
Park University
DePaul University Janet Olpert
Timothy Meyer Cameron University
Peter MacGregor Edinboro University
Estrella Mountain Community College Warren Pat Ormond
Michael Michaelson Utah Valley State College
Mack Palomar College
Northwest Vista College, San Antonio Donna John Panzica
Cindy Minor Community College of Rhode Island Rajesh
Madsen John A. Logan College
Parekh
Kirkwood Community College Ed Mannion Alanah Mitchell
California State University–Chico Alan Maples Iowa State University
Appalachian State University
Cedar Valley College Norman Muller Bettye Jewel Parham
Greenfield Community College Daytona Beach Community College Merrill
Kenneth E. Martin
University of North Florida Rebecca Mundy Parker
University of California, Los Angeles, and Chattanooga State Technical Community
Thomas Martin
University of Southern California Paul Murphy College
Shasta College
Massachusetts Bay Community College Michelle Parker
Roberta Mae Marvel
Kathleen Murray Indiana Purdue University
Casper College
Jerry Matejka Drexel University James Gordon Patterson
Adelphi University Marry Murray Paradise Valley Community College David E.
Portland Community College Pence
Diane Mayne-Stafford
Grossmont College Sonia Nayle Moberly Area Community College Teresa Marie
Los Angeles City College Peterman
Elizabeth McCarthy
Kirkwood Community College Sue A. McCrory Charles Nelson Grand Valley State University
Missouri State University Rock Valley College Marie Planchard
Jacob McGinnis Bruce Neubauer Massachusetts Bay Community College Jim
Park University Pittsburgh State University Potter
Philip H. Nielson California State University–Hayward

xxx
Tammy Potter Western Illinois University
West Kentucky Community & Technical College Jane Ritter
Leonard Presby University of Oregon
William Patterson State College William Pritchard Fernando Rivera
Wayne State University University of Puerto Rico–Mayaguez Campus
Delores Pusins Donald Robertson
Hillsborough Community College Janak Rajani Florida Community College–Jacksonville Stan Ross
Howard Community College Newbury College
Eugene Rathswohl Russell Sabadosa
University of San Diego Manchester Community College Glen Sagers
Alan Rea Illinois State University
Western Michigan University Behrooz Saghafi
Carol B. Reed Chicago State University
Mount Wachusett Community College Jerry Reed Greg Saxon
Valencia Community College New Jersey Institute of Technology Barbara Scantlebury
John Rezac Mohawk Valley Community College Judy Scheeren
Johnson County Community College Pattie Riden Westmoreland County Community College Al Schroeder
Richland College
Acknowledgments
Dick Schwartz David Trimble
Macomb County Community College Earl Schweppe Park University
University of Kansas Jack VanDeventer
Susan Sells
Washington State University
Wichita State University
Sue VanBoven
Tom Seymour
Paradise Valley Community College
Minot State University
Naj Shaik
Heartland Community College
Harry D. Shea
Missouri State University
Morgan Shepherd
University of Colorado–Colorado Springs
Elaine Shillito
Clark State Community College
Jack Shorter
Texas A&M University
James Sidbury
University of Scranton
Bonnie Sue Specht Smith
Fresno City College
Maureen Smith
Saddleback College
Stephanie Spike
Tallahassee Community College
Diane Mayne-Stafford
Grossmont College
Esther Steiner
New Mexico State University
Randy Stolze
Marist College
Kathleen Tamerlano
Cuyahoga Community College
Kasia Taylor
Anne Arundel Community College
Susan Taylor
Mount Wachusett Community College
Charlotte Thunen
Foothill College
Denis Tichenell
Los Angeles City College
Angela Tilaro
Butte College
Martha Tillman
College of San Mateo
DeLyse Totten
Portland Community College

xxxi
Melinda White Siena College
Seminole State College of Florida Anita Whitehill
Pauline White Foothill College
Edward Winter
Acknowledgments
Salem State College
James Van Tassel
Floyd Winters Mission College
Manatee Community College Michelle Vlaich-Lee
Nancy Ann Woolridge Greenville Technical College Jim Vogel
Fullerton College Sanford Brown College
Israel Yost Dale Walikainen
University of New Hampshire Christopher Newport University Reneva Walker
Alfred Zimermann Valencia Community College Ron Wallace
Hawai’i Pacific University Blue Mountain Community College Nancy Webb
Eileen Zisk City College of San Francisco Steve Wedwick
Community College of Rhode Island Heartland Community College Sandra M. (Sandy) Week
Mary Ann Zlotow University of Nevada–Reno Patricia Lynn Wermers
College of DuPage North Shore Community College Cora Lee Whitcomb
Bentley College
Doug White
Western Michigan University

xxxii
1
INTRODUCTION
to INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY: The Future Now
Chapter Topics & Key Questions
UNIT 1A: The Mobile World, Information Technology, & Your Life
1.1 Information Technology & Your Life: The Future Now What is information
technology, and how does it affect education, health, money, leisure, government,
and careers?
1.2 Information Technology Is Pervasive: Cellphones, Email, the Internet,
& the E-World How does information technology facilitate email, networks, and
the use of the Internet and the web; what is the meaning of the term cyberspace?

UNIT 1B: The Basics of Information Technology

1.3 The Practical User: How Becoming Tech Smart Benefits You What does
being tech smart mean, and what are its practical payoffs?
1.4 The “All-Purpose Machine”: The Varieties of Computers What are the dif
ferent sizes of computers, and what are clients and servers?
1.5 Understanding Your Computer What four basic operations do all computers
use, and what are some of the devices associated with each operation? How does
communications affect these operations?
1.6 Where Is Information Technology Headed? What are three directions of
computer development and three directions of communications development?

Download the free

UIT 11e App for key
term flash cards
quizzes and a game,
Over the Edge
1
CHAPTER FORECAST In this chapter we begin by discussing how
computing and the Internet affect your life. We then discuss smartphones, the
Internet, the World Wide Web, and other aspects of the electronic world (e-world).
Next we describe how being smart about information technology can benefit you,
and then we cover the varieties of computers. We then explain three key concepts
behind how a computer works and what goes into a personal computer, both
hardware and software. We conclude by describing three directions of computer
development and three directions of communications development. All these
concepts are discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

UNIT 1A: The Mobile World, Information

Technology, & Your Life
“Mobile computing . . . will be the catalyst that brings society the most
dramatic changes of the Information Revolution.”

So writes Michael Saylor, author of The Mobile Wave.1 The information revolution that
began with writing on clay tablets, then continued through the invention of the print
ing press, radio and TV, and room-size and desktop computers, is now at a “tipping
point,” he asserts. Now mobile devices such as smartphones — cellphones with built-in
applications, multimedia capability, and Internet access —and tablet computers —
wireless portable computers primarily operated by a touch screen —are changing
nearly everything we do.
Consider the example below, the first in a number of “mini-cases,” business related and
otherwise, that we present in this book:

TECH TALES The Rise of Mobile Computing: The Getting-Smarter

Smartphone
While growing up, Nick Bilton noticed that as his father aged, his wallet
expanded as he added new credit cards, membership cards, family photos,
stamps, tickets, and other things—until it became so large that he would
pull it out of his back pocket when he sat down, “dropping it on the table
like a brick,” Bilton says. 2
However, for Bilton, a New York Times technology columnist, it’s been the
reverse experience: Each year his wallet has become slimmer. “Things that
once belonged there have been [taken over] by my smartphone,” he reports,
to the point where “I realized I didn’t need to carry a wallet anymore. My
smartphone had replaced almost everything in it.”
Today Bilton’s address books, calendars, maps, music players, and photos
have all been absorbed into his smartphone. So have most identification
cards—customer cards, gym membership ID, insurance cards, and so on—
which now exist as photos carried in the phone. Movie tickets, coupons, and
airline boarding passes also can be stored as replicas.
The only two non–mobile phone items Bilton carries are his driver’s license

Chapter 1
and a bank debit card (instead of cash). “But I’m confident,” he says, “that
those, too, will disappear someday” and become part of the smartphone.
It would be simplistic, however, to predict that we’ll be doing all our computing
on just smartphones and tablets anytime soon. As one writer points out, “Heavier pro
ductivity tasks—like, you know, typing—are still much easier to pull off on standard
2
laptops and desktops.” 3 Moreover, the uses of smartphones and other portable devices
cannot be truly mastered without understanding their huge supporting
infrastructure of computing and communications technologies—the
subjects of the rest of this book.
Even so, people ages 16 to 39, members of the “Millennial Generation,”
who generally spend eight hours a day or more looking at various screens
—on cellphones, on computers, on TVs—generally have a head start on
computer technology. 4
They are, as one anthropologist called them, “digital natives” or computer-
technology natives, constantly busy with text messag ing, email, and the
Internet, the global “network of networks,” and its most well-known
feature, the multimedia World Wide Web —the “Web” or “web,” with its
massive collection of web sites, or related collections of files. 5 Indeed,
among college students, 98% are Internet users and 92% are wireless
(laptop or cellphone) users. 6 While their parents continue to shop in retail
stores (often using clipped-out paper coupons), Millennials are more likely
than older shoppers (by 50% vs. 21% 7 ) to check out

“Well, I keep

busy.” Multiple electronic devices allow people to multitask, or do multiple

tasks simultaneously— sometimes too many tasks.
 brands on social networks — sites on the World Wide Web such as Facebook and
Twitter that (as we’ll describe) allow users to interact and develop communities
around similar interests —and use mobile devices to research products and compare
prices.
In addition, Millennials are 2½ times more likely than older generations to be early
adopters of technology. 8 This is a good thing, because we live in what Tom Peters, author
of In Search of Excellence, calls discontinuous times, or “a brawl with no rules,” where
dealing with change is an ongoing challenge. 9 Others speak of the “disruptive” effect of
computers and their software that “is going to eat not just the technology industry but
every industry systematically.” 10
What are the developments that have led to these turbulent times? The answer is infor
mation technology. Information technology (IT) is a general term that describes any
technology that helps produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate
information. Of the top 30 innovations from 1969 to 2009, according to a panel of profes
sionals at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, most were related to
( See Panel 1.1.) Among the first items on their list, for
information technology.11 •
example, are (1) the
Internet, broadband, and the World Wide Web; (2) PC and laptop
computers; (3) mobile phones (cellphones); and (4) email. Indeed, the Internet, along
with semiconductors

1. Internet, broadband, World Wide field of information technology.

Web 2. PC and laptop computers
3. Mobile phones
4. Email
5. DNA testing and sequencing 6.
Magnetic resonance imaging 7.
Microprocessors
Introduction to Information
8. Fiber optics
9. Office software Technology
10. Laser/robotic surgery
11. Open-source software
12. Light-emitting diodes
13. Liquid crystal display
14. GPS devices
15. E-commerce and auctions
16. Media file compression 17.
Microfinance
18. Photovoltaic solar energy 19.
Large-scale wind turbines 20. Internet
social networking 21. Graphic user
interface
22. Digital photography
23. RFID and applications
24. Genetically modified plants 25.
Biofuels
26. Barcodes and scanners 27. ATMs
28. Stents
29. SRAM flash memory
30. Antiretroviral treatment for AIDS
panel 1.1
Top innovations in recent years
The majority (23 of the 30) are in the
To be more than just a new invention, an event was defined as an innovation if it created more opportunities
for growth and development and if it had problem-solving value.
Source: Adapted from “A World Transformed: What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years?”
Knowledge@Wharton, February 18, 2009, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid52163
(accessed May 10, 2013).
3
(processors), is said to rank among the 15 greatest innovations in all history, as important
as the invention of the number zero, money, printing, and participatory democracy. 12
Unlike previous generations, you live in a world of pervasive computing or ubiquitous
computing— computing is everywhere. The basis for this phenomenon is the Internet, the
“Net” or “net,” that sprawling global connection of smaller computer networks that enable
data transmission at high speeds. Everything that presently exists on a personal computer,
experts suggest, will move onto the Internet, giving us greater mobility and involving the
Internet even more closely in our lives. 13 Already, in fact, the United States has more devices
connecting to the Internet than it has people—425 million smartphones, tablets, personal
computers, and gaming consoles divided among the USA’s 311.5 million residents. 14

1.1 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & YOUR LIFE:

The Future Now
Information technology affects almost all aspects of our lives,
including education, health, finance, recreation and entertainment,
government, jobs and careers, and your personal life.
This book is about computers, of course. But not just about computers. It is also about
the way computers communicate with one another. When computer and communications
technologies are combined, the result is information technology, or “infotech.” Information
technology (IT), we said, is a general term that describes any technology that helps pro
duce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information. IT merges comput
ing with high-speed communications links carrying data, sound, and video. Examples of
information technology include personal computers but also various forms of handheld
devices, televisions, appliances, and other machines.

Two Parts of IT: Computers & Communications

Information technology comprises both computer technology and
communications technology.
Note that there are two important parts to information technology—computers and
communications.

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY You likely know what a computer is, but to get to a formal
definition: a computer is a programmable, multiuse machine that accepts data—raw
facts and figures—and processes, or manipulates, it into information we can use,
such as summaries, totals, or reports. Its main purpose is to speed up problem solving and
increase productivity.

COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY Communications technology , also called tele

communications technology, consists of electromagnetic devices and systems for com
municating over any distance. The principal examples are telephone, radio, satellite,
broadcast television, and cable TV. We also have communication among computers—
which is what happens when people “go online” on the Internet. Online means using a
computer or some other information device, connected through a network, to access
information and services from another computer or information device. A network
is a communications system connecting two or more computers; the Internet is the
largest such network.
Information technology is already affecting your life in multiple ways, of course, and
will do so even more in the future. Let’s consider how.

Education: The Promise of More Interactive

 Chapter 1
& Individualized Learning
Education has become heavily involved in information technology.
Education pays, with recent college graduates having lower rates of unemployment,
4
higher earnings, and better career prospects than their lesser educated peers. 15 At every
level, the education system benefits from information technology, whether programs, which at the college level counted over
it’s online sys tems allowing families to track their elementary students’ 6.7 million students taking at least one online course
grades, high schools enabling use of smartphones for students to get help in 2012. 21 A relatively recent development was the
on assignments, or colleges offering free online education. 16 appearance of free online courses called massive
open online courses, or MOOCs.22 Examples are
TECH TALES Technology in Education: Adjusting Instructor courses offered by companies such as
Presentations to the Students Coursera,
In her physics classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Professor Gabriella Sciolla’s high-tech classroom has whiteboards and Sur vival Tip Online Colleges and
huge display screens instead of blackboards. The professor can make Accreditation
brief presentations of general principles and then throw out multiple-
For-profit institutions are
choice questions that students “vote” on, using wireless “personal not accredited by the same
response clickers.” standards as traditional not
for-profit universities. Often
These devices transmit the answers to a computer monitored by the the course work in these pro
professor, helping her gauge the level of understanding in the room. prietary schools is not eligible
“You know where they are,” she says. She can then adjust, slow down, for transfer into traditional
or engage students in guided discussions of their answers. 17 schools. For more information
on how schools are accredited:
In her mathematics classes at Hillcrest High School in Greenville, South www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/
Carolina, teacher Jennifer Southers has flipped education upside-down. accred/index.html
Instead of coming to school and listening to a lecture in class and then
going home to try out what they learned, her students first listen to an
http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/
online video lecture at home before class and then come to class where
www.guidetoonlineschools.com/
they can apply their knowledge with their teacher there to help them. online-schools
“The level of frustration has almost disappeared completely on those http://chronicle.com/article/
lessons when we do that,” says Southers. 18 Online-Programs-Face
New/129608/
www.prweb.com/releases/2012/
THE USES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN COLLEGE When properly non-profit/prweb9090071.htm
integrated into the curriculum and the classroom, information technology http://distancelearn.about.com/od/
can (1) allow students to personalize their education, (2) automate many onlinecourses/a/Are-For-Profit
tedious and rote tasks of teaching and man aging classes, and (3) reduce the Online-Colleges-A-Rip-Off.htm
teacher’s workload per student, so that the teacher can spend more time on
reaching individual students. 19 For instance, email , or “electronic mail,”
messages transmitted over a computer network, most often the
Internet, are used by students to set up appointments with professors
(62%), discuss grades (58%), or get clarification of an
assignment (75%). 20
Besides using the Internet to help in teaching, today’s
college instructors also use presentation graphics
software such as PowerPoint to show their lecture
outlines and other materials on classroom screens (as
we discuss
in Chapter 3). In addition, they use Blackboard, It’s
Learning, Inc., and other course-management soft
ware (CMS) (or learning management systems) for
administering online assignments, individual learn
ing plans, schedules, examinations, and grades.

ONLINE LEARNING One of the most signifi

cant developments in education at all levels is the
rise of distance learning , or online learning , or
e-learning , the names given to online education
 more info!
From now on, whenever you
see the more info! icon in the
margin, you’ll find information
about Internet sites to visit and
how to search for terms related
to the topic just discussed.

Avatar. The

simulated depictions of humans are a staple not only of videogames but also of
computerized training programs. (What culture does “avatar” come from? See
www.answers.com/topic/avatar?cat 5technology . )

Introduction to Information Technology Institute, Kaplan University, Strayer University, and the University of
edX, Udacity, and Udemy, which feature offerings from Princeton, Phoenix. More than a third of institutions of higher education—and 97% of
Stanford, Brown, Duke, Columbia, and other universities. public universities—offer online courses, and many have attracted on-
E-learning has also propelled the rise of for profit institutions, such as campus students, who say they like the
Colorado Technical flexibility of not having to attend their
Interactive education. Interactive whiteboard math class. A whiteboard is a white classes at a set time. 23
surface with multitouch, multiuser, and pen/stylus functionalities that also
E-learning has been put to such varied uses
displays the contents of a computer screen. A projector projects the computer’s
as bringing career and technical courses to
desktop onto the board’s surface. The board is typically 5
mounted to a wall or floor stand. The following websites provide
detailed information about get
ting college degrees online:
www.onlinecollegedegrees.net/
www.earnmydegree.com/index.
html
www.classesusa.com/indexall/?ca
mpusType 5 online
www.guidetoonlineschools.com/
www.usdla.org/
http://distancelearn.about.com/
(includes information about bad
programs, called diploma mills )
www.distancelearning.com/
www.elearners.com/resources/

more info!
Carnegie Learning’s
more info! Online Colleges Cognitive Tutor
Software
www.carnegielearning.com/specs/
cognitive-tutor-overview/

Chapter 1
high school students in remote prairie towns, pairing gifted science students
with master teachers in other parts of the country, and helping busy
professionals obtain further cre dentials outside business hours.
TUTORING, SIMULATION, & AVATARS But the reach of information
technology into education has only begun. “Intelligent tutoring systems”
software is now available that gives students individualized instruction
when personal attention is scarce—such as the software Cognitive Tutor,
which not only helps high school students to improve their performance in
math but also sparks them to enjoy a subject they might have once disliked.
In colleges, more students may use interactive simulation games, such as
McGraw Hill’s Business Strategy Game, to apply their knowledge to real-
world kinds of prob lems. And employees in company training programs
may find themselves engaged in mock conversations with avatars —
computer depictions of humans, as are often found in online videogames
—that represent imaginary customers and coworkers, combining the best
parts of computer-based learning with face-to-face interaction. An avatar is
also part of your online representation of yourself; it gives other users a
“face” to go with your username (“online name”).

Health: High Tech for Wellness

Computers are now often used in the fields of health and
medicine.
“Digital technology—on phones and tablets, in electronic record keeping,
and in a host of clinical innovations—is transforming medicine in virtually
every way,” says one account. “Not the least of the changes is the shifting
relationship between doctors and patients.” 24 (For now we use the word
digital to mean “computer-based.”)

TELEMEDICINE Telemedicine —medical care delivered via

telecommunications—has been around for some time. For example,
physicians in rural areas lacking local access to radiologists have used
“teleradiology” to exchange computerized images such as X-rays via
telephone-linked networks with expert physicians in metropolitan areas.
Now telemed
icine is moving to an exciting new level, as the use of digital cameras and
sound, in effect, moves patients to doctors rather than the reverse.
 6

PRACTICAL ACTION
How to Be a Successful Online Student

1. Familiarize yourself with the computer and software. Be comfortable communication process.
with the computer, Internet, email, web browser, and search engine 8. Pay attention to detail, particularly when following written
software. Use tutorials to become familiar with the software used directions. Assignments, projects, and so on are posted in written form.
by your online school. Grades are drawn from work accomplished as directed. When grading
Take advantage of technology. Learn the various ways of assignments, the instructor will look for competence in the work
communicating on the web. Blogging, podcast ing, submitted. This means that all the required steps were followed
videoconferencing, and chatting (discussed later in the book) are and presented in a professional manner.
tools that will help you with online studying.
9. Create a private study area. This will help you to focus on your
2. Do you have regular access to the Internet? Do you have your own studies without distractions and ensure that others do not to disturb
email account? It is necessary to maintain regular communication you while you are in your study area. Keep all your study materials
with the instructor with whom you are taking the course. You must be here, so you know where to look for them.
able to answer your email quickly during the school week, which
means within 24 hours after receipt. And you should be able to suc 10. Interact with your peers. Contribute and exchange your ideas,
cessfully send and receive email with attachments. Stu dents must perspective, and comments with your
have a reliable Internet service provider (ISP) and email account online classmates. Join online student communities and blogs.
before the start of class. (Students are often required to use a school 11. Interact with your faculty. Constantly stay in touch with your
email account.) professors. Consult them if you have technical diffi culties or
3. Read every document within your syllabus within the first five days of problems in understanding something related to the course. Since
your online course. This is usually the time to begin introducing your professors cannot see you,
yourself to your classmates and instructor and to start asking
questions concerning the expectations described in the syllabus. You Introduction to Information Technology
need to know what is expected of you. you must be absolutely clear in expressing your ideas and needs.
Know how to find assignments and course material, as well as 12. Evaluate and test yourself. Take tests after thor ough
be able to participate in and post to discus sions and send emails preparation. Don’t hurry to take the tests; time them carefully. Have
with attachments. your work evaluated by fellow
4. Are you comfortable working on your own? Are you self-motivated? classmates.
You will have flexible use of the time to spend on course work. Due 13. Netiquette: Remember the dos and don’ts. When you are online,
dates are set by the instruc tor. Flexibility and independence are be careful of netiquette (online etiquette). Both the real world and the
agreeable to some, but for others it is difficult to self-start. Be honest virtual world are inhabited by people, so the same rules apply. Never
with yourself about your capabilities. be rude or disrespectful. Respect the privacy of other people.
It is the student’s responsibility to take the course seriously and
to be able to budget time to receive a suc cessful grade. Make a Source: Adapted from www.olhcc.edu/Documents/academics/ 1%20Online
schedule and stick to it. %20Courses%20Are%20You%20Ready.pdf ; www
5. Can you make deadlines? Your instructor is counting on you to finish .brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/26877.aspx ; and
your work on time. Your communication may be virtual (online), but www.onlinedegreedirect.com/onlinedegreedirect-articles/10- 7
your tasks and assigned deadlines are not. Easy-Ways-to-Become-a-Good-Online-Student.htm .
Be consistent in the amount of time you take to read and study.
Every week you will be expected to read sec tions in your textbook.
Try not to get behind in your class work; try to stay on course or
ahead. Some online learning programs move at an advanced rate;
missing one week is like missing two in a traditional classroom.
6. Is this the right time for you to take an online class? You should be
confident that you can set aside enough time for your online course
assignments and study
time. You may feel that taking
an online course will free up your
time for other tasks. If you are feeling
overwhelmed by other responsibilities, such as work or family
obligations, then perhaps you had better
postpone your involvement. Online courses require as much and
often more personal preparation time than on- campus courses.
Everything that you would normally communicate by speech in class
must be typed in an online course.
7. You will need good written communication skills. Remem ber, your
primary means of communication is through writing. Being able to
send well-structured messages and essays will help with the
 Hi

gh-tech medicine. ( left) Screenshot of the visual patient record software

pioneered at Thy-Mors hospital. This patient has had a fracture of the femur in
the right leg. This computer-based image shows a close-up view of
the treated
area. A click on the arrow on the highlighted femur would show the
pertinent
medical information from the record on the right panel. The tool
allows doctors
to easily zoom in and out on a particular body region or part and
choose
between many different views. ( top right) Open heart surgery is seen
on a
computer monitor as an Israeli medical team repairs a congenital
defect in a
boy’s heart at the Wolfson Medical Center in Tel Aviv. (bottom right)
Ultralight
Anthropomorphic Hand compared with a human hand. This artificial
hand
is for use as a prosthetic or as an attachment on a humanoid robot. Unlike
conventional alternatives, it performs human-like movements and can grasp a
wide range of objects. The hand uses hydraulic fluid actuators, positioned in
the fingers and wrist. These allow flexibility of movement and are also self-adapting, ensuring that the hand’s grasp is never too hard
or soft. The actuators also ensure that the hand is lightweight and inexpensive to produce. The surface of the hand is soft to the touch,
making it feel more natural. It was developed at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.

TECH TALES New Telemedicine: The Doctor Will See You Now—Right Now

info! New York technology writer Michael Wolff had a rotten cold and his regular
more doctor was on vacation. So he used a program called ZocDoc. “I entered
my particulars: my ZIP code, my malady, my insurance,” he wrote. “And
Health Websites bingo, I had my choice of doctors in the vicinity and available
appointments that day. I chose an ear-nose-and-throat man a 10-minute
Some reliable sources:
walk from my house.” 25
www.medlineplus.gov
www.nimh.nih.gov Similarly, Anna Keyes, an employee of a Houston-based Caterpillar dealer,
www.womenshealth.gov/ who couldn’t shake chest congestion, walked down the office hallway and,
www.mayoclinic.com
with the help of a clinical paramedic, connected to a physician 20 minutes
www.nationalhealthcouncil.org
away, who examined her with an Internet-linked stethoscope and a
handheld video camera. In 20 minutes, she was back at her desk with the
www.yourdiseaserisk.wustl.edu/
diagnosis of an allergy and a prescription to cope with it. 26
Image transfer technology allows radiologic images such as CT scans and
MRIs to be immediately transmitted to electronic charts and physicians’
offices. 27 Patients in intensive care, who are usually monitored by nurses
during off-times, can also be watched over by doctors in remote “control
towers” miles away. Recent telemedicine innovations include use of
smartphones to enable doctors to take an electrocardiogram almost
Chapter 1 anywhere and to help patients track for signs of skin cancer. 28
8 Electronic medical records and other computerized tools enable heart attack
patients to get follow-up drug treatment and diabetics to have their blood
sugar measured. Software can compute a woman’s breast cancer risk.

ROBOT MEDICINE Various robots —automatic devices that perform

functions ordinarily performed by human beings, with names such as
ROBO DOC, RoboCart,
 National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and
Kawada Industries, Inc. Five feet tall, it performs traditional Japanese
dancing. Priced at $365,000, the robot can help workers at construction
sites and also drive a car. (top right) Lexie Kinder, 9, who was born with
a chronic heart disease that makes attending school risky, smiles in
class through a robot called a VGo, at Alice Drive Elementary School in
Sumter, S.C. A robot takes the place of a sick student in the classroom.
( bottom right) Humanoid robot KOBIAN displays an emotion of sadness
during a demonstration at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. KOBIAN,
which can express seven programmed emotions by using its entire body,
including facial expressions, has been developed by researchers at
Waseda’s Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering.

TUG, and HelpMate—help free medical workers for more critical tasks. The four
armed da Vinci Si surgical robot, for instance, can do the smallest incisions and stitches
for complex surgery deep inside the body, so that surgery is less traumatic and recov
ery time faster. 29 Hydraulics and computers are being used to help artificial limbs get
“smarter,” 30 and pressure-sensitive artificial skin made of tiny circuits is expected to
Introduction to Information Technology
improve limbs’ effectiveness. 31 An international team of researchers at of Tel Aviv
University is working on a biomimetic computer chip for brain stimulation that is pro
grammable, responsive to neural activity, and capable of bridging broken connections
in the brain. This device could be used to replace diseased or damaged brain tissue,
restore brain functions lost to aging, and even treat epilepsy, chronic pain, http://financialsoft.about.com/
od/morefinancialsoftware/tp/
and Parkin son’s disease. 32
Online_Software_List.htm
www.financialcalculators.com/
HEALTH SELF-HELP Want to calculate the odds on how long you will live? www.finance.yahoo.com
Go to www. livingto100.com , an online calculator developed by longevity www.fool.com
researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Medical Center. Want www.ragingbull.com
to gather your family health history to see if you’re at risk for particular www.usatoday.com/money/default.
inherited diseases? Go to www.hhs.gov/familyhistory to find out how. htm
One in three Americans has also gone online to figure out a medical
condition, and 59% of adults say they have looked online for health
information in the past year. 33 (How ever, some online health information
can be misleading and even dangerous.) Some cancer patients have created
fund-raising sites on the web to raise money to pay for their out-of pocket
costs, an activity known as crowdfunding.34 more info!
more info! Showrooming Articles
Crowdfunding http://bits.blogs.nytimes.
com/2013/02/27/more-retailers
Some information on success at-risk-of-amazon-showrooming/
ful crowdfunding: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/
www.cfpa.org/ monica-guzman/2013/05/04/
smart-shopping-or-petty
http://mashable.com/category/
theft-caught-in-the-act-of
crowdfunding/
showrooming/
www.startupexemption.
www.forbes.com/sites/
com/crowdfunding
abrambrown/2013/04/04/a-new
101#axzz2NR6m7NJa/
move-by-best-buy-to-eliminate
9 showrooming-trap/

more info!
Financial Information
The Internet contains lots of
financial information. Some of
the better sources:
 assignments.
Chapter 1 (See Gigwalk, EasyShift, or TaskRabbit.)
10
• Putting your experience to work as a tutor. (See Smartthinking or Tutor.)
Money & Business: Toward the Cashless Society
Information technology is reducing the use of traditional Government & Electronic Democracy: Participating in
the Civic Realm
money.
Information technology is helping governments to deliver
“The future of money is increasingly digital, likely virtual, and possibly services and affecting political activism.
universal,” says one writer. 35 Virtual means that something is created,
simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or a computer The Internet and other information technology have helped government
network but also that it seems almost real. We certainly have come a deliver better ser vices and have paved the way for making governmental
long way toward becoming a cashless—and virtual money—society. operations more transparent to the public. They have also changed the
Besides currency, paper checks, and credit and debit cards, the things that nature of politics.
serve as “money” include cash-value cards (such as subway fare cards),
automatic transfers (such as direct IMPROVING GOVERNMENT SERVICES In Boston, the next time your car
deposit paychecks), and digital money (“electronic wallet” accounts such as hits a pothole, you can use a feature (called Street Bump) to report it to
PayPal). someone in city

SMARTPHONES & SHOPPING Consumers have long been able to do online

buying and selling via computers, ordering products and having them
delivered by UPS or FedEx, but the popularity of smartphones is altering
the shopping experience even more. For instance, as you enter a shopping
mall, your phone might start buzzing with alerts for coupons at nearby
stores, information on traffic patterns, or advice on gifts. 36 Or as you check
the price on a camera at Best Buy, your phone might tell you that Target is
responding by aggressively cutting the price on the same product, and as
other retailers scan their competition on the Internet, prices might change
several times even within the space of a day. 37 Some retailers, you may
discover, may vary the price of the same product depending on the ZIP
code you live in and how close you are to a rival’s store. 38 Many of these
efforts are traditional retailers’ response to the phenome non known as
showrooming— the practice of customers examining merchandise in
traditional brick-and-mortar retail store without buying it and then
shopping online to find a lower price, which 75% of respondents to one
survey acknowledged having done. 39
Your phone may also be used as a payment system, so that, for instance, at
Starbucks you can pay for your coffee at the register by displaying a code
(bar code) on your mobile device, using a feature called Square Wallet. 40
Or you can pay using the Starbucks Card app. Compa nies such as Square
and PayPal also offer mobile credit-card swiping devices that cab drivers
and small merchants can attach to their smartphones to accept credit cards
from customers. 41

USING DIGITAL TOOLS TO EARN MONEY “As communication and

information tech nologies advance,” says a Census Bureau analyst, “we are
seeing that workers are increas ingly able to perform work at home.” 42
Indeed, the share of telecommuters, or people who work from home at least
one day a week, jumped from 7.8% to 9.5% of all workers during the years
2005–2010. 43
Among the home-based or “micro-jobs” that people hoping to pick up extra
cash can do are these: 44

• Selling art, crafts, or collectibles online—those you’ve created, such as

jewelry or
pottery, or those you found at garage sales. (See Artbreak,
Etsy.com , or Redbubble.)
Licensing your photos to microstock photo agencies. (See iStockphoto,
•
Shutterstock,
or Dreamstime.)

• Taking on quick tasks, such as doing odd jobs or quick fieldwork

 are problematic, only overseas and military Online Government
personnel can cast ballots via email, and only Help
under certain conditions. 51 Still, in 12 states,
You can gain access to U.S. government (federal, state, and
systems have been launched that allow citizens to local) agencies through the fol lowing websites:
register online to vote, which has the effect of
www.usa.gov
increasing voter registration. 52
www.govspot.com
The Internet is also changing the nature of www.info.gov
politics, enabling political candidates and political www.statelocalgov.net/
interest groups to connect with voters in new
www.globalcomputing.com/states. html
ways, to raise money from multiple small donors
instead of just wealthy groups, and (using Foreign governments’ websites:
cellphones and text messaging) to organize http://libguides.northwestern.edu/ ForeignGovernmentList
protests. 53 Yet information technology also has its
y 11
downside, as computers have helped incumbent Introduction to Information Technolog
legislators to design (gerrymander) voting districts
that make it nearly impossible for them to be
dislodged. 54 Electronic tools have also made it
easier for politi
cal parties to skirt campaign laws, and
computerized voting machines still don’t always
count votes as they are supposed to. 55 Still, many
government who can do something about it. users of the web have become important
Boston also has a smartphone feature with which watchdogs on government. The site E-Democracy
you can adopt a fire hydrant, keeping it snowfree ( http://forums.e-democracy.org/ ), for instance,
and making sure there’s access. 45 In 2012, can help citizens dig up government conflicts of
Redwood City, California, became the first city in interest, and sites such as Project Vote Smart (
the nation to allow residents to chat with a police www.votesmart.org/ ) outline candidates’
officer online via voice, text, or video. 46 In positions.
Seattle, San Diego, and Oakland, police Electronic voting. Voting using computer technology
departments use social media such as Twitter and and a touch screen
Facebook to provide residents with moment-to-
moment crime reports. 47 In Chicago, police are
fighting back against shootings and murders by
building a database , a computer sys tem with a
collection of interrelated files, to track the social
connections of the city’s dozens of street gangs
and their myriad factions. 48 Some city officials,
such as former Newark, New Jersey, mayor Cory
Booker, use social media such as Twitter to make
major announcements and to communicate more
quickly with constituents than tradi
tional channels, such as radio and TV, allow. 49
The federal government, as you might expect, is
also a big user of information technology. The
U.S. State Department has a “DipNote” blog read
by more than 2 million readers, and it holds press
conferences on YouTube. Congress has a publicly
searchable site on the web for all federal contracts
and grants over $25,000, and a growing number of
states are putting every
thing from budgets to contracts to travel expenses
online for the public to look at. The White House
also has its own site ( www.whitehouse.gov ), with
its Open Government Dialogue blog.

CHANGING POLITICS Online voting is on the rise,

with voters in the tiny East European nation of
Estonia, for instance, being able to vote in the
comfort of their homes via the Internet. Security
is preserved with the help of a special electronic
ID card. 50 In the United States, however, where more info!
voting is regulated at the state level and secure IDs
 more info! business startup the kind of information and access that only large

2013 Best Computer Careers

Comparisons & Reviews (Tech
Media network)
http://computer-careers-review. toptenreviews.com/

Discipline (bachelor's degree) Current Average Starting Salary

panel 1.2
Jobs & Careers
People now use computers to post résumés and find jobs.
Whether ordinary jobs in which computers are used as ordinary tools or
specialized jobs involving advanced computer and professional training,
almost every occupation today requires computer skills of some sort.
Among the top 12 occupations with a promising future and requiring at
least a bach elor’s degree are five in information technology: programmer,
software developer, systems analyst, network and computer systems
administrator, and information security analyst/ web developer/computer
network architect. 56 Other top-paying jobs also require good computer
skills: accounting, market research, human resources, specialized sales,
mechan ical engineering, industrial engineering, and financial analysis. 57
ries for jobs most college graduates are apt to
The average starting sala
consider are shown below. (
• See Panel 1.2.)
“Most jobs today require a working knowledge of certain computer skills,”
says one analyst. “Employers seek and reward employees with the skills
and knowledge to send messages across the country via email; use a
spreadsheet to create a graph and paste it into a report; add and edit data in
a database; understand the implications of file sizes, memory limitations,
and network arrangements; and recognize the function and features of
modern computer components. Any job candidate who already possesses
these skills will stand above those who do not” (University of Central
Florida Continuing Education; www.ce.ucf .edu/Program/3121/Computer-
Skills-For-The-Workplace/ ).

STARTING UP YOUR OWN VENTURE So pervasive have computers and the

Internet become that now is a fantastic time to “find new [career] routes
into the uncharted wilder ness of the 21st-century economy,” writes Bard
College professor Walter Russell Mead. 58 Start-up costs for new ventures
are incredibly low. “A decent computer and an Internet connection gives a
Family practice physician
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| $176,183
The job market
Average 2012 salaries Financial analyst |||||||||||||||||||||| $80,000 |||||||||||||||||||||| $80,000 ||||||||||||||||||||
Computer programmer $74,389
Registered nurse |||||||||||||||||||| $74,354
Source: Data from Assoc. professor of biology ||||||||||||||||||| $71,692
National Association of Mechanical engineer |||||||||||||||||| $67,131
Colleges and Employers; Graphic designer ||||||||||||||||| $60,721
TheProfessionalEngineer.com ; SalaryExpert.com ; MySalary.com ; Crime lab analyst |||||||||||||||| $58,370
www.cnn.com . Computer technician (III) ||||||||||||||| $55,660
Management information (IT) systems Chemical engineer High school teacher ||||||||||||||| $55,241
Computer science professor Accountant |||||||||||||| $54,902
Lead video game designer Special education teacher ||||||||||||| $45,339
Database manager Bookkeeper |||||||||||| $43,500
Website developer Preschool (daycare) teacher ||||||||||| $37,369
Entry-level attorney ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| $115,780 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| $109,195 |||||||| $27,000
English professor ||||||||||||||||||||||||||| $99,102 ||||||||||||||||||||||||| $90,000
Software development engineer Marketing manager ||||||||||||||||||||||||| $90,000 |||||||||||||||||||||||| $87,946
|||||||||||||||||||||||| $86,068 ||||||||||||||||||||||| $81,099
Discipline (bachelor's degree) Average Starting Salaries for Selected Majors

Chapter 1 12
Marketing
Computer science
Chemistry
Political science
Biology
Criminal justice
English
Psychology
Physics
Communications (not IT)
Elementary education
|||||||||||||||||| $59–61,000
||||||||||||||||| $47–49,000
|||||||||||||||| $44,500 |||||||||||||||
$40,400 ||||||||||||||| $40,100 ||||||||||||||
$38–40,000 |||||||||||||| $38,900
||||||||||||| $35,200
|||||||||||| $33,600

|||||||||||| $31–33,000 ||||||||||| $29–

31,000
corporations used to be able to afford,” he says. “You don’t need nearly as
much money to start up a business as you used to—and there are many
businesses that a recent college grad can launch with little more equipment
than that old college computer.”
Among the possibilities are photography, home design, travel, food
preparation and delivery, fashion, financial planning, tutoring, educational
counseling services, fitness training, child care, or any number of other
activities. The best method is to consider the needs and problems of your
friends and neighbors and build a small business around sat
isfying those needs. In particular, look toward solving the problem of
bottling the “hose of the Internet,” filtering, organizing, and customizing
the torrent of information so people can benefit from it. The life you build
that way will probably be more satisfying, says Mead, “and may well be
substantially more remunerative than anything a traditional, off-the-shelf
career has to offer.”

WAYS FOR YOU TO FIND EMPLOYERS To have a chance of succeeding in

today’s job market, you need to combine a traditional education with
training in computer skills. You also need to be smart about job searching,
résumé writing, interviewing, and postings of employment opportunities.
Advice about careers and job hunting is available at Career
Builder.com , Career Advice Blogs, Working World, National Careers
Service, and other sites on the web.
As you might expect, the first to use cyberspace as a job bazaar were
companies seeking people with technical backgrounds, such as computer
programmers. Now, however, online job exchanges have broadened to
include openings for forest rangers in
Idaho, physical

Sur vival Tip Some Basic

Computer Skills Needed for Office Jobs
Keyboarding (typing)
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Internet browser and email (communications both on
the Internet and within a business environment)
File sharing
 Ca

reers. ( left ) Front-desk workers at many hotels use computers to check in guests. ( right ) A technician cycles in the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the French village of Cessy near Geneva in Switzerland. As
hundreds of engineers and workers start two years of work to fit out the giant LHC particle collider to reach deep into unknown realms of
nature, CERN physicists look to the vast machine to unveil by the end of the decade the nature of the mysterious dark matter that makes up a

quarter of the universe and perhaps find new dimensions of space. Introduction to Information Technology
Police work. Syracuse, New
York: An Onondaga County
sheriff’s deputy enters
information into a laptop in his
squad car as he issues a ticket
for an uninspected vehicle.

13

more info!
Beyond.com: www.beyond.com
CareerBuilder: www.careeronestop.org Computer Basic Skills Test
CareerOneStop: www.careeronestop.org CollegeGrad: Job Hunter: A computer basic skills test is
usually a prerequisite for a job
www.collegegrad.com Dice: www. dice.com or for placement companies:
FedWorld (U.S. government jobs): www.fedworld.gov FindTheRightJob: www.cvtips.com/interview/
www.findtherightjob.com NationJob Network: www.nationjob.com computer-basic-skills-test-job
interview-tips.html
Indeed.com: www.indeed.com
Yahoo! Careers: http://us.careers.yahoo.com
Jobs.com: www.jobs.com
JobsOnline: www.jobsonline.com
MonsterCollege: http://college.monster.com/?wt.mc_n=monstertrak Monster:
www. monster.com
Simply Hired: www. simplyhired.com
U.S. Dept. of Labor: www.bls.gov/oco/

panel 1.3
Some websites that post job listings
 Black People Meet, Asian People Meet), religion (ChristianMingle, JDate
Chapter 1 for Jewish daters), occupations ( FarmersOnly.com ), and over 50 (Senior
14 Friend Finder). 68 There are also niche sites for smokers, vegetarians, dog
therapists in Atlanta, models in Florida, and English teachers in China. lovers, and so on. One website, Find Your
Most online job boards—Monster, Craigslist, CareerBuilder, and others—
many require that you fill out an online
are free to job seekers, although
registration form. (
• See Panel 1.3.) More com panies are also turning to
social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and the professional site LinkedIn
as a way to broadcast job openings. 59 Facebook, for instance, offers a fea
tured called the Social Jobs App for a central hub for members to find
postings to about 1.7 million open jobs in the United States. 60

WAYS FOR EMPLOYERS TO FIND YOU Posting your résumé online for
prospective employ ers to see has to be done with some care. Besides
featuring a succinct summary of your top achievements and related skills, it
should also include links or web addresses to social-media profiles and
online portfolios (as of projects you have done). If you’re applying for a
specific job, your résumé should include applicable keywords from the
employer’s job description. 61 Indeed, some companies now use tracking
programs to scan résumés for keywords, former employers, years of
experience, and schools attended to identify candidates of likely interest. 62
Some companies are even ditching résumés and the conventional job
interview process for “Twitterviews”—interviews on Twitter. 63 Indeed,
says one account, some “recruiters are filling openings faster by relying on
new tools that scour social networks and target work ers who aren’t
necessarily looking for jobs,” one example being Recruiter by LinkedIn. 64
Obviously, if you want to be found, you need to make yourself visible.
Thus, some experts suggest you need to set up a Facebook page that allows
you to interact with others on a professional level, to participate in Twitter,
and to write comments (posts) on other people’s online journals—their
blogs (weblogs), frequently updated sites on the World Wide Web
intended for public consumption that contain a writer’s observations,
opinions, images, and links to other websites.65 Also , your personal
Facebook page should be pro fessional, because companies now do searches
to examine a job candidate’s web presence (
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443759504577631410093
879278.html ).

Your Personal Life

Computers are playing important roles in our personal
lives.
Celebrating Thanksgiving away from home? No matter. You may join the
festivities through a laptop set on the family table in your usual spot,
connected by high-definition TV cam era and a communication service such
as Skype or Google Hangout. 66 Or you might post photos of the dinner
you’re enjoying to show to your family and close friends on Facebook,
send a general Thanksgiving cheer to your Twitter followers, and post
images of the most
interesting dishes on an online photo-sharing service such as Instagram. 67
Technology has affected our personal lives in ways that were almost
unimaginable 15 years ago. Two examples:

ONLINE RELATIONSHIP SITES Online relationship sites , or online

dating sites, provide electronic forums that people may join in the hope
of meeting compatible companions or mates. There are over 1,000 such
sites, the biggest and best-known being the mainstream sites Match.com ,
PlentyOfFish, Zoosk, eHarmony, and Singles.net . Then there are niche
sites, such as those for people of the same ethnicity (LatinAmerican Cupid,
FaceMate, uses facial recognition to match couples who look alike. 69 Of course, other
websites help people to find new friends, not potential mates, such as, for women, Social
Jane.com and GirlFriendCircles.
Social-networking websites are not specifically designed for finding dates, but that is
how they are being used. Facebook, Twitter, and others let users build personal sites to
express their interests and display their personality. Facebook’s Graph Search extends
searches for singles on the network to friends of friends. 70 Many online matchmakers are,
of course, accessible on smartphones.
OTHER AREAS OF PERSONAL LIFE “As we sit here,” says the head of consulting firm
Creative Strategies, “digital is embedded into the fiber of every aspect of our culture and
our personal lives.” 71 Worried about walking across campus at night? Armed Safety Button
is a smartphone feature that, once activated, will track your location, set off an alarm, take
a series of photos of an assailant, project a blinding light, and place a call to 911. 72 Need
more exercise or want to lose weight? There’s a Nike Training Club iPad feature that you
can use in your living room. There’s also an electronic fork, the HAPIfork, that monitors
eating speed and, through use of vibrations, encourages the user to slow down. 73 New baby
in the family? A subscription to Diapers.com might be just the ticket. 74 There seems to be
technology for every phase of life—and even beyond it, including memorial websites that
celebrate the lives of those who have departed. 75

1.2 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IS PERVASIVE:

Cellphones, Email, the Internet, & the E-World
Email, network, Internet, web, smartphone, text, tweet, and cyber
space are now common terms in many languages.
One of the first computers, the outcome of military-related research, was delivered to the
U.S. Army in 1946. ENIAC (short for E lectronic N umerical I ntegrator A nd C alculator)
weighed 30 tons, and was 80 feet long, and 2 stories high, but it could multiply a pair of
numbers in the then-remarkable time of three-thousandths of a second. (
• See Panel 1.4.)
This was the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer, the grandparent of
today’s lightweight handheld machines—including the smartphone. Some of the principal
historical developments are shown in the timeline on the next page. (
• See Panel 1.5.)
The Phone Grows Up
The telephone is not what it used to be.
Cellphone mania has swept the world. All across the globe, people have acquired the
portable gift of gab, with some users making over 45 calls and writing more than 90
texts a day. By the end of 2013, overall mobile penetration rates will probably have
reached 96% globally; and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said

Introduction to Information

Technology
panel 1.4
Grandparent and offspring:
ENIAC ( left) is the grandpar
ent of today’s iPad ( right).
 15
Smartphones. ( left ) Apple 5G iPhone; ( middle ) Android Samsung Galaxy III
smartphone; ( right ) Nexus smartphone
mobile subscriber numbers may top 7 billion in 2014 (about the total
population of the planet). 76 About 88% of Americans 18 and older owned a
cellphone in 2012. 77 It has taken more than 100 years for the telephone to
get to this point—getting smaller, acquiring push buttons, and losing its
cord connection. In 1964, the * and # keys were added to the keypad. In
1973, the first cellphone call was processed.
In its most basic form the telephone is still so simply designed that even a
young child can use it. However, as a smartphone, it is now becoming more
versatile and complex—a way of connecting to the Internet and the World
Wide Web and

allowing you not only to make voice calls but also to send
and receive email and text messages, take and send photos
and videos, get map directions, and obtain news, research,
music, photos, movies, and TV programs.

“You’ve Got Mail!” Email’s Mass Impact

Email revolutionized communication, and
has many benefits, but in many areas it is
being supplanted by texting.
It took the telephone 40 years to reach 10 million custom
ers, and fax machines 20 years. Personal computers made
it into that many American homes 5 years after they were
introduced. Email, which appeared in 1981, became pop
ular far more quickly, reaching 10 million users in little
more than a year. 78 No technology has ever become so
universal so fast.
Until 1998 hand-delivered mail was still the main
means of correspondence. But in that year the volume
of email in the United States surpassed the volume of
4000–1200 BCE 3500 3000 BCE 900 BCE 100 CE
BCE–2900 BCE 1270 BCE 530 BCE

Chapter 1
Inhabitants of
the first known
civilization in
Sumer keep
records of
commercial
transactions on clay
tablets
Phoenicians develop
an alphabet;
Sumerians develop
cuneiform writing;
Egyptians develop
hieroglyphic writing
Abacus is invented in
Babylonia
First
encyclopedia (Syria)
First
postal service
(China)
Greeks start

the first library

First
bound books
 16
hand-delivered mail. In 2013 there were reportedly 2.2 billion email users commensurate with the need to connect with other people.” 81
worldwide, and global email traffic reached 144 billion messages a day. 79
Using electronic mail clearly is different from calling on a tele phone or
writing a conventional letter. As one writer puts it, email “occupies a
psychological space all its own. It’s almost as imme diate as a phone call,
but if you need to, you can think about what you’re going to say for days
and reply when it’s convenient.” 80 Email has been popular, points out
another writer, not because it gives us more immediacy but because it gives
us less. “The new appeal of email is the old appeal of print,” he says. “It
isn’t instant; it isn’t immediate; it isn’t in your face.” Email has succeeded
for the same reason that the videophone—which allows callers to see each Always on. Most of
other while talking—has been so slow to catch on: because “what we
actually want from our exchanges is the minimum human contact
today’s students have never experienced life without cyberspace.

Young people are more apt to send instant messages and to do texting , or text messaging — sending and receiving short written messages between
mobile phones or other portable or fixed devices.82
What is interesting, though, is that in these times, when images often seem to overwhelm words, email is actually reactionary. “The Internet is the first
new medium to move decisively backward,” points out one writer, because it essentially involves writing. Twenty years ago, “even the most literate of
us wrote maybe a half a dozen letters a year; the rest of our lives took place on the telephone.” 83 Email has changed all that—and has put pressure on
busi
nesspeople in particular to sharpen their writing skills. (A countertrend, unfortunately, is that the informal style of electronic messages, especially
texting, is showing up in schoolwork.) 84

The Internet, the World Wide Web, & the “Plumbing of Cyberspace”
The net, the web, and cyberspace are not the same things.
As the success of the smartphone shows, communications has extended into every nook and cranny of civilization (with poorer nations actually the
leaders in cellphone growth), a development called the “plumbing of cyberspace.” The term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson in his novel
Neuromancer (1984) to describe a futuristic computer net
work into which users plug their brains. ( Cyber comes from “cybernetics,” a term coined in 1948 to apply to the comparative study of automatic
control systems, such as the brain and the nervous system and mechanical-electrical communication systems.) In everyday use, this term has a rather
different meaning.
Today many people equate cyberspace with the Internet. But it is much more than that. Cyberspace includes not only the web, chat rooms, online
diaries and articles (blogs), and social networking—all features we explain in this book—but also such things as conference calls and automated teller
machines (ATMs). We may say, then, that cyberspace encompasses not only the online world and the Internet in particular but also the whole
wired and wireless
panel 1.5
Timeline
Overview of some of the historical developments in information technology. In upcoming chapters we modify the timelines to show you more
about the people and advances contributing to developments in

information technology.

Introduction to Information Technology

700–800 1049 1450 1455 1621 1642 1666
Arabic First movable Newspapers appear in Gutenberg, Germany) mechanical adding Pascal) that can add and
numbers introduced to type (clay) invented in Europe Slide rule invented machine First subtract (Samuel
Europe China Printing press (J. (Edmund Gunther) (Blaise mechanical calculator Morland)
First

17

PRACTICAL ACTION
Managing Email
constantly checking email: Process email for 5 to 10 minutes each hour

D
rather than as

espite the popularity of texting and social network ing, email is still the messages come in or at times
when you can’t really send a reply.
Incidentally, research has shown that stu
preferred way for people to com
municate at work. Some people receive as dents who engage in very high email usage also often show depressive
many symptoms. 88 Conversely, other research finds that people who do not
as 300 emails a day—with perhaps 200 being junk email (spam), look at email frequently at work were less stressed and more productive
unwanted email (“social spam,” such as alerts from social networks), bad than others. 89
jokes, or irrelevant memos (the “cc” or “courtesy copy”). One study found • Avoid using “Reply All”: People hate getting all those “thanks” and
that the average knowledge worker spends 28% of the workweek writing, “appreciated” emails, as well as the deluge of “reply alls” with messages
read of only minimal interest to them. Avoid using this feature unless your
ing, or responding to email. 85 message is really important. 90
Shayne Hughes, CEO at Learning for Leadership, man dated the
unthinkable—forcing his workers to communicate for one week the old- • Don’t send long attachments: Attachments—computer files of long
fashioned way, face to face, which actu ally boosted productivity. Hughes documents or images attached to an email— are supposed to be a
believes dealing with email distracts employees from strategic thinking and convenience, but large files often just clog the mail system.
discussions. He also argues that “there’s a feeling senders get when • Don’t open attachments you don’t recognize: Some dangerous computer
emailing someone with a problem or issue—a misplaced feel ing of relief.” He viruses—renegade programs that can damage your computer—have been
adds, “It’s as if that person is simply detail ing the problem, clicking send, spread by email attachments that automatically activate the virus when
and all of sudden that problem is now someone else’s.” 86 they are opened.
Some tips: 87 • Be aware that anyone might read the emails you send: Don’t send a
message electronically you would be ashamed of if a third party read it.
• Send less email, and send better email: The more email you send, the Email messages are not written with disappearing ink; they remain in a
more you’ll get. Put short messages in the subject line so that recipients computer system long after they have been sent. “Delete” removes the
don’t have to open the email to read the note. Make one point per email. email from the visible list, but the messages remain on your hard disk
Don’t reply to every email message you get. Don’t “cc” (copy to) people and some serv
unless absolutely necessary. Don’t send chain let ers and can be retrieved by experts. (Special software,
ters or lists of jokes. Don’t overuse the high-priority flag. • Don’t waste time

1714 1801 1843

First patent mass typewriter engine World’s
for a typewriter Chapter 1 produced in America (automatic first computer programmer,
(England) calculator, calculator) Ada Lovelace, publishes
the Thomas her notes
A linked Arithnometer
sequence of punched 1829
cards controls the weaving
patterns in Jacquard’s William
loom Austin 1833
1820 patents Babbage’s
the first difference
The first workable
 18
such as Spytech Eradicator and Revo, can completely erase email from the than one way.
hard disk, as we discuss later.) • Make sure emails to bosses, coworkers,
and custom ers are literate: It’s okay to be informal when emailing friends, THE INTERNET’S INFLUENCE: LIKE A “SECOND SKIN” There is no doubt
but employers and customers expect a higher standard. Pay attention to that the influence of the net and the web is tremendous. At present, about
spelling and grammar. • Don’t use email to express criticism and sarcasm: 82% of U.S. adults (94% of ages 19–29) use the Internet, according to Pew
Because email carries no tone or inflection, it’s hard to Internet. 91 But just how revolutionary is the Internet? Is it equivalent to the
convey emotional nuances. Avoid criticism and sarcasm in electronic invention of television, as some technologists say? Or is it even more
messaging. Nevertheless, you can use email to provide quick praise, even important—equivalent to the invention of the printing press? “Television
though doing it in person will take on greater significance.
turned out to be a powerful force that changed a lot about society,” says
• Be aware that email you receive at work is the prop erty of your employer: technology writer
Be careful of what you save, send, and back up.

more info!
Apple Cloze
world of communications in general —the nonphysical terrain created by Cloze, a free Apple iPhone app,
computer and com munications systems. Cyberspace is where you go when functions as an inbox-analyzing
you go online with your computer. expert. Cloze studies emails
and other social-network
interactions, sorts messages
THE NET & WEB DEFINED The two most important aspects of cyberspace according to who sent them,
are the Internet and that part of the Internet known as the World Wide and prioritizes those from
Web. To give them formal definition: people it thinks matter most
to you.

• The Internet—the heart of the Information Age: Called “the mother of all0014241278873243386045783281
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10

net 90148068924.html
works,” the Internet (the “Net” or “net”) is a worldwide computer
network that connects hundreds of thousands of smaller networks.
These networks link educa tional, commercial, nonprofit, and military
entities, as well as individuals.
The World Wide Web—the multimedia part of the Internet: The
•
Internet has
been around for more than 40 years. But what made it popular,
apart from email, was the development in the early 1990s of the World
Wide Web , often called simply the “Web” or the “web”—an
interconnected system of Internet computers (called servers) that
support specially formatted documents in multimedia form. The word
multimedia, from “multiple media,” refers to technology that presents
information in more than one medium, such as text, still images, moving Introduction to Information Technology
images, and sound. In other words, the web provides information in more
1844 Washington Investigation 1876 processing project— transmitted robot,
to Baltimore on the Laws Hollerith’s automatic 1907 derived
Samuel Morse sends a 1854 of Thought,” Alexander census-tabulating from
telegraph a system Graham machine (used First the Czech
message from George Boole publishes for symbolic Bell punched regular word for
“An and logical patents the cards) radio compulsory labor, is
reasoning that will telephone 1895 broadcasts, from first used
become 1890 New York to mean a
the basis for First 1920–1921 humanlike
computer Electricity used for first radio
machine
time in a data signal The word
design

19

info!
www.isoc.org/internet/history/ brief.shtml
more

Brief History of the Internet

We cover the Internet in more detail in the next
chapter, but if you would like a brief history of the
Internet now, go to:
1927 (which lets people rent their homes to travelers) practical, but a college
Kevin Maney. “But the printing press changed everything—religion,
government, science, global distribution of wealth, and much more. If the
Internet equals the printing press, no amount of hype could possibly overdo
it.” 92
Unquestionably, however, for most of us the Internet and information
technology have become like a second skin—an extension of our intellects
and even emotions, creating almost a parallel universe of “digital selves.”

UNIT 1B: The Basics of Information

Technology
Perhaps you have been using computers a long time and in a multitude of
ways. Or perhaps not. In either case, this book aims to deliver important
practical rewards by helping you become “computer streetwise”—that is,
tech smart.

1.3 THE PRACTICAL USER: How Becoming Tech

Smart Benefits You
Being informed about information technology has
practical payoffs.
Being tech smart means knowing what information technology can do and
what it can’t, knowing how it can benefit you and how it can harm you, and
knowing when you can solve computer problems and when you have to
call for help.
Among the practical payoffs are these: You will know how to . . .

MAKE BETTER BUYING DECISIONS No matter how much prices on

computers and portable devices come down, you will always have to make
judgments about quality and usefulness when buying services, equipment,
and software, including apps— short for “applications,” small, specialized
programs downloaded onto mobile devices.
Incidentally, downloading is defined as transferring data from a remote
computer to one’s own computer or mobile device. Uploading is the
reverse—transferring data from your own device to a remote
computer.

TECH TALES What Apps Do You Really Need?

When you acquire a new smartphone, you may find that it comes with
many apps already preinstalled, with millions of others available on the
Internet for free or very reasonable prices. The challenge: Deciding which
apps are really useful, since having too many apps can drain the power
from the battery on your phone, use too much memory, and possibly
introduce security risks (which we discuss in a later chapter).
A frequent traveler, for instance, may find an app such as HotelTonight 1945
(showing last-minute hotel rooms available in a particular city) or Airbnb
1924 1944

company, founded in First (Germany) produces

Chapter 1 1896, to demonstration of the first fully functional
T.J. Watson renames International Business television in USA 1941 programmable digital
Hollerith’s machine Machines (IBM) Konrad Zuse computer, the Z3 (ran
by perforated celluloid First electronic programmable) and Clifford Berry First programmable (owned by the John von Neumann
strips) digital computer (but developed by electromechanical U.S. government) introduces the concept
1942 non John Atanasoff computer (Mark I) of a stored program

20
student may have no use for them. Students will, however, probably benefit
from adding the following free or low-cost apps to their smartphones or
tablets: 93
Swype, SwiftKey 3, Path Input Pro: Make typing on a smartphone or
touch-screen tablet faster and more accurate; some of these even make
corrections as you type.
Skype, FaceTime: Allow you to video chat for free with others throughout
the world, using your device’s front- or rear-facing cameras.
Evernote: Write, type, or speak your ideas to Evernote, which helps you to
stay organized.
Google Earth: Lets you explore the world through satellite and ground
level photos.
Pocket: Lets you save content you like, so you can read it later.
Snapguide: Provides user-created how-to guides.

FIX ORDINARY COMPUTER PROBLEMS Whether it’s replacing a printer cartridge,

obtaining a software improvement (“patch” or “upgrade”), or pulling photos from your digi
tal camera or smartphone’s camera, we hope this book gives you the confidence to deal with
the continual challenges that arise with computers—and know when and how to call for help.

UPGRADE YOUR EQUIPMENT & INTEGRATE NEW TECHNOLOGY New gadgetry and
software are constantly being developed. A knowledgeable user learns under what conditions
to upgrade, how to do so, and when to start over by buying a new machine or mobile device.

USE THE INTERNET EFFECTIVELY

The sea of data
that exists on the Internet and other
online sources is so
great that finding what’s best or
what’s really needed can
be a hugely time-consuming activity.
We hope to show
you the most workable ways to
approach this problem.

PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST

ONLINE DANGERS
The online world poses real risks to
your time, your
privacy, your finances, and your peace
of mind—
spammers, hackers, virus developers, identity thieves,
and companies and agencies constructing giant data
bases of personal profiles—as we will explain. This
book aims to make you streetwise about these threats.

KNOW WHAT KINDS OF TECHNOLOGICAL USES

CAN ADVANCE YOUR CAREER Top executives use
 Introduction to Information Technology
technological devices, as do people in careers ranging from police work Tech smart. To be able to choose a computer system or the components to build
to politics, from medicine to music, one, you need to be tech smart.

1946 1952 1962

1947 1951 1958 1969
First States (ENIAC) miniaturization of UNIVAC computer Integrated circuit; first invented Advanced Research
programmable Invention electronic devices) correctly predicts modem (Spacewar) Projects
electronic of the transistor Computers are first sold election of Eisenhower The first ARPANET established Agency;
computer (enabled commercially as U.S. computer game is by U.S. leads to
in United president Internet

21
from retail to recreation. We hope you will come away from this book with ideas about
how the technology can benefit you in whatever work you choose.

Along the way—in the Experience Boxes, Practical Action boxes, Survival Tips, and
More Info! features—we offer many kinds of practical advice that we hope will help you
to become truly computer smart in a variety of ways, large and small.

1.4 THE “ALL-PURPOSE MACHINE”: The Varieties of

Computers
Computers come in different sizes; they also function as clients
and/or servers.
When the ★ alarm blasts you awake, you leap out of bed and head for the kitchen, where
you check the ★ coffee maker. You probably also check your ★ smartphone. After using
your ★ electronic toothbrush and showering and dressing, you stick a bagel in the ★
micro wave, and then pick up the ★ TV remote and click on the ★ TV to catch the
weather fore cast. Later, after putting dishes in the ★ dishwasher, you may go out and
start up the ★ car and head toward campus or work. Pausing en route at a ★ traffic light,
you turn on your ★ iPod to listen to some music.
You haven’t yet touched a PC, a personal computer, but you’ve already dealt with at
least 11 computers—as you probably guessed from the ★ s. All these familiar appliances
rely on tiny “computers on chips” called microprocessors. Maybe, then, the name
“computer” is inadequate. As computer pioneer John von Neumann has said, the device
should not be called the computer but rather the “all-purpose machine.” It is not, after all,
just a machine for doing calculations. The most striking thing about it is that it can be put
to any number of uses.
What are the various types of computers? Let’s take a look.
 All Computers, Great & Small: The Categories of Machines
There are five basic computer sizes.
At one time, the idea of having your own computer was almost like having your own
personal nuclear reactor. In those days, in the 1950s and 1960s, computers were
enormous machines affordable only by large institutions. Now they come in a variety of
shapes and sizes, which

1
introduced game 1975 Apple I 4 IBM computer
Chapter 1 for storing (Pong) computer 5" introduces 1982
1970 data; first First micro (first personal floppy disk; personal
dynamic computer computer sold in Atari home computer; Portable
Micro RAM chip (MIT’s assembled videogame; mouse computers
processor 1972 Altair form) first spam email sent becomes
chips come into use; 8800) 1978 1981 regular
floppy disk First video 1976 part of a

22
1.Titan 17.6–20 petaflops U.S.A. 2.Sequoia 16.32 petaflops U.S.A. 3.K- danger
Computer 10.51 petaflops Japan 4.Mira 10.1 petaflops U.S.A. 5.Juqueen 5 ously loud”; “anyone spending more than 15 minutes in the
petaflops Germany same room with the Titan supercomputer must wear earplugs or
risk permanent hearing damage. The din in the room [does] not
come from the computer’s 40,000 whirring processors, but from
Source: From CNN Money, “The 5 Fastest Supercomputers,”
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/ the fans and water pipes cooling them.” 95
enterprise/2012/11/12/fastest-supercomputer/index.html , July 21, 2013. Supercomputers are still the most powerful computers, but
a new generation may be coming that relies on nanotechnol
ogy , in which molecule-size nanostructures are used to cre
can be generally classified according to their processing power:
supercomputers, mainframe computers, workstations, microcomputers, and ate tiny machines for holding data or performing tasks.
microcontrollers. We also consider servers. ( Nano means “one-billionth.”) Computers the size of a pencil
eraser could become available that work 10 times faster than
today’s fastest supercomputer. Eventually
Supercomputers nanotech could
Supercomputers are used in very special situations. panel 1.6
Typically priced from $1 million to more than $350 million, Top five supercomputers
supercomputers are high- capacity machines with thousands of
processors that can perform more than several quadrillion calculations
per second. These are the most expensive and fastest computers
available. “Supers,” as they are called, have been used for tasks requiring
the processing of enormous volumes of data, such as doing the U.S. census
count, forecasting weather, designing aircraft, modeling molecules, and more info!
breaking encryption codes. More recently they have been employed for
business purposes—for instance, sifting demographic marketing Flops
information—and for film animation. The fastest computer in the world, In computing, FLOPS is an
costing $100 million to build and with roughly the computing power of .5 abbreviation of Floating-point
million of today’s most powerful laptops, is the Titan supercomputer, Operations Per Second. Flops
capable of 17.6–20 petaflops (17.6–20 quadrillion calculations per second) , is used as a measure of a
computer’s performance,
Ridge National Laboratory in the Tennessee Valley. ( especially in fields of scientific
located at the Oak • See calculations. With floating
Panel 1.6.) This almost unimagina point encoding, extremely
ble computational capability is about equal to 7 billion people solving 3 long numbers can be handled
relatively easily. Computers
million math problems per second. It would take 60,000 years for 1,000 operate in the trillions of flops;
people working at a rate of one calculation per second to complete the for comparison, any response
number of calculations that Titan can process in a single second. 94 time below 0.1 second is expe
The cost of electricity for the Titan is more than was $9 million a year. rienced as instantaneous by a
human operator, so a simple
“The sound of 20 quadrillion calculations happening every second is pocket calculator could be said
to operate at about 10 flops.
Humans are even worse float
ing-point processors. If it takes
a person a quarter of an hour
to carry out a pencil-and-paper
long division with 10 significant
digits, that person would be cal
culating in the milliflops range.

Introduction to
Information Technology
show up in every device and appliance in your life.
The Titan. This is the world’s fastest supercomputer.

1984
1990
1994
1998
2000
2001
2002
2003
Apple
Macintosh; first
personal laser
printer
Laptops become
very
popular
Apple and IBM
introduce PCs with
full-motion video built
in; wireless data
transmission for
small portable
computers; first web
browser invented
PayPal is founded
The “Y2K”
nonproblem; the first
U.S. presidential
webcast
Dell computers
becomes the
largest PC maker
Friendster
Facebook; MySpace
 23
used to be called minicomputers, although today the term is seldom used.
Mainframes are used by large organizations—such as banks, airlines,
insurance companies, and colleges—for processing millions of
transactions. Often users access a mainframe by means of a terminal ,
which has a display screen and a keyboard and can input and output
data but cannot by itself process data. Mainframes process billions of
instructions per second.

Workstations
IBM zEnterprise mainframe computer Workstations are used for graphics, special effects, and
certain professional applications.
Introduced in the early 1980s, workstations are expensive, powerful
personal computers usually used for complex scientific, mathematical,
and engi neering calculations and for computer-aided design and
computer-aided manufacturing; they are usually connected to a network
. Providing many capabilities comparable to those of midsize mainframes,
workstations are used for such tasks as designing airplane fuselages,
developing prescription drugs, and creating movie special effects.
Workstation
Workstations have caught the eye of the public mainly for their graphics
capabilities, which are used to breathe three dimensional life into movies
such as Avatar, Harry Potter, Iron Man, and Lord of the Rings. The
capabilities of low-end workstations overlap those of high-end desktop
microcomputers.

Microcomputers
Microcomputers are used by individuals as well as
businesses, and they can be connected to networks of
larger computers. There are many types of
microcomputers.
Desktop PC
Microcomputers , also called personal computers (PCs), which cost
$500 to over $5,000, can fit next to a desk or on a desktop or can be
carried around. They either are stand-alone machines or are connected to
a computer network, such as a local area network. A local area network
(LAN) connects, usually by special cable and also wirelessly, a group of
desktop PCs and other devices, such as printers, in an office or a
building.
Tower PC (with speakers, Microcomputers are of several types: desktop PCs, tower PCs, notebooks
(laptops) and netbooks, tablets, mobile devices, and personal digital
keyboard, and mouse) assistants—handheld computers or palmtops. Also, some microcomputers
are powerful enough be used as workstations.

Chapter 1IBM PC sold DESKTOP PCS Desktop PCs are the original style of microcomputers
Mainframe Computers whose case or main housing sits on a desk, with keyboard in front and
monitor (screen) often on top.
Mainframe computers are used in many large businesses.
The only type of computer available until the late 1960s, mainframes are TOWER PCS Tower PCs are microcomputers whose case sits as a
water- or air cooled computers that cost $5,000–$5 million and vary in “tower,” often on the floor beside a desk, thus freeing up desk space.
size from small, to medium, to large, depending on their use. Small Some desktop computers, such as Apple’s iMac, no longer have a boxy
mainframes ($5,000–$200,000) are often called midsize computers; they housing; most of the computer components are built into the back of the
flat-panel display screen.

24 2004 to Lenovo Group; Flickr 2005 You Tube; Wii 2006 Twitter 2007
Skype; introduces 2008 become popular Apple 2015 computers Teleportation?; intelligence The
Apple iPhone 2010 releases iPad 2017 self-aware 2030–2045 Singularity
Netbooks Foldable machine
also called laptop computers, are lightweight portable computers with
built-in monitor, key board, hard-disk drive, CD/DVD drive, battery,
and AC adapter that can be plugged into an electric outlet; they weigh
anywhere from 1.8 to 12 pounds.
Netbooks are mini-notebooks—low-cost, light weight, small computers
with functions designed for basic tasks, such as web searching, email,
and word processing. They weigh anywhere from 2.25 to 3.2 pounds,
Small! The Mac Mini has the smallest desktop cost generally between $200 and $400, have less processing power than
notebooks, and have screens between 7 and 10 inches wide diag onally.
Netbooks are being used less now in favor of tablets and smaller laptops,
microcomputer case, just 6.5 inches square and 1.25 inches tall. such as Chromebooks.
NOTEBOOKS AND NETBOOKS Notebook comput ers ,

TABLET COMPUTERS Computers such as those in

Apple’s iPad line, Google’s Nexus, the Kindle Fire, and
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab are examples of a tablet
computer , a wireless portable computer that uses a
touch screen (or a kind of pen called a stylus) to
access information. The touch screen is a 7- to 10-inch
screen on which you can manipulate words, images, and
commands directly with your finger. Tablets are rapidly
eroding sales of note
book and netbook computers. 96 Tablets might soon be
replaced by phablets— tablets that are also
smartphones. 97

ers and tablets, mobile devices are small, handheld

multimedia devices for consumers and business pro
fessionals. Fully Internet integrated, they are highly
compatible with desktop microcomputers and notebooks.
Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are handheld comput
ers that combine personal organization tools— schedule
planners, address books,

to-do lists—with the abil

Laptop computers: MacBook Air and Chromebook

MOBILE DEVICES &
PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSIS
TANTS Smaller than notebook and netbook comput
Tablets. Hewlett-Packard
Touchsmart touch screen and Apple iPad tablet

Introduction to Information Technology

Mobile devices ity in some cases to send email and faxes. Some
PDAs have touch-sensitive screens. Some also connect to desktop 25 Kindle Paperwhite 2 and Nook Simple Touch
computers for sending or receiving information.

E-READERS Produced by Amazon (the Kindle) and by Barnes &

Noble (the Nook), e-readers , or e-book read ers, are electronic
devices that can download e-books— digital versions of regular
books, articles, and magazines from various suppliers. E-readers
are generally book-size and can easily be put in a purse or a pocket.

The range of handheld wireless devices, such as smart phones, has

surged in recent years, and we consider these later in the book
(Chapters 6 and 7).
Chapter 1 26 Microcontrollers
Microcontroller. Many personal and household gadgets
(left) Various
contain
microcontrollers in a
car. (right) Injection
microcontrollers.
of a VeriChip, which, Microcontrollers , also called embedded
when implanted in a computers, are the tiny, spe cialized
person’s forearm or microprocessors installed in “smart”
shoulder, can provide appliances and auto mobiles. These
medical and identity microcontrollers enable microwave ovens, for
information when example, to store data about how long to cook
scanned. your potatoes and at what power setting.
Microcontrollers have been used to develop a new
universe of experimental electronic appliances—
e-pliances. For example, they are behind single-
function products such as digital cameras and
digital music players, which have been developed
into hybrid forms such as gadgets that store
photos and videos as well as music. They also help
run tiny machines embedded in clothing, jewelry,
and such household appliances as refrigerators. In
addition, microcontrollers are used in blood-
pressure monitors, air bag sensors, gas and
chemical sensors for water and air, and vibration
sensors.

Servers
Servers are computers having special
software dedicated to providing
services to other computers.
The word server describes not a size of computer
but rather a particular way in which a computer is
used. Nevertheless, because servers have become
so important to tele communications, especially
with the rise of the Internet and the web, they
deserve mention here.
A server , or network server, is a central
computer that holds collections of data
(databases) and programs for connecting or
supplying services to PCs, worksta tions, and
other devices, which are called clients . These
clients are linked by a wired or wireless
Servers network. The entire network is called a client-
. (top) Lead technician services different companies’ server network. In small organizations, servers
Internet servers at Switch and Data PAIX in Palo Alto,
California. Switch and Data PAIX is one of the primary can store files, provide printing stations, and
Internet exchange points in North America, serving transmit email. In large organizations, servers
hundreds of businesses servers. (bottom) A group of may also house enormous libraries of financial,
networked servers that are housed in one location is sales, and product information.
called a server farm or a server cluster.
You may never lay eyes on a supercomputer or
mainframe or even a tiny microcon troller. But
most readers of this book already have seen and
used a personal computer. We consider this
machine next.
1.5 UNDERSTANDING YOUR
COMPUTER
All computers use four basic
operations and can be connected to
various types of devices.
 Perhaps you know how to drive a car. But do you • Hardware: Hardware consists of all the Sur vival Tip
know what to do when it runs badly? And you’ve machinery and equipment in a computer
probably been using a personal computer. But do
you know what to do when it doesn’t act right— system. The hardware includes, among other Input is
covered in detail in
when, for example, it suddenly crashes (shuts devices, the keyboard, the screen, the printer, Chapter 5.
down)? and the “box”—the computer or processing
device itself. Hardware is useless without Introduction to
Cars are now so complicated that professional
mechanics are often required for even the smallest software. Information
problems. With personal computers, however, Software: Software , or programs, consists of
there are still many things you can do yourself— •
Technology 27
and should learn to do, so that, as we’ve all the electronic instructions that
tell the
suggested, you can be effective, efficient, and computer how to perform a task. These
employable. To do so, you first need to know how instructions come from a software developer in a
computers work. form (such as a CD, or compact disk, or an
Internet download) that will be accepted by the
How Computers Work: Three Key computer. Examples are Microsoft Windows 7
Concepts and Windows 8, Microsoft Office 2013, and
Apple Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
All computer users must understand
three basic principles: (1) Data is 3. THE BASIC OPERATIONS OF A COMPUTER.
turned into information; (2) hardware Regardless of type and size, all computers use the
own specific same four basic operations: (1) input, (2)
and software have their
functions; and (3) all computers involve processing, (3) storage, and (4) output. To this we
add (5) communications.
input, process
ing, storage, and output, Input operation: Input is whatever is put in
plus communications. •
(“input”) to a computer system. Input
can be
Do you always have to buy an off-the-shelf nearly any kind of data—letters, numbers,
computer? No. Could you customize your own symbols, shapes, colors, temperatures, sounds,
personal computer? Yes. Many ordinary users pressure, light beams, or whatever raw material
order their own customized PCs. Let’s con sider needs processing. When you type some words or
how you might do this. numbers on a keyboard, those words are
We’re not going to ask you to actually order a PC considered input data.
—just to pretend to do so. The purpose of this
exercise is to give you a basic overview of how a
computer works. This information will help you
when you go shopping for a new system. It will
also help you understand how your existing
system works, if you have one.
Before you begin, you need to understand three
key concepts.

1. PURPOSE OF A COMPUTER: TURNING DATA

INTO INFORMATION. Very simply, the purpose of
a computer is to process data into information.

• Data: Data consists of the raw facts and figures

that are processed into
information —for
example, the votes for different candidates being
elected to student government office.
Information: Information is data that has been
•
summarized or otherwise
transformed for use
in decision making —for example, the total votes
for each candidate, which are used to decide who
won.

2. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HARDWARE &

SOFTWARE. What is the difference between
hardware and software?
 Chapter 1 28
Keyboard
Processing operation: Processing is the
Customizing a computer is not as hard
Sur vival Tip • as you might think.
manipulation a computer does to
transform data Now let’s see how you would order a custom-
into information. When the computer adds 2 1 2 built desktop PC. Remember, the purpose of this
Processing is covered to get 4, that is the act of processing. The is to help you to understand the internal workings
in detail in Chapter processing is done by the central processing unit of a computer so that you’ll be knowledgeable
4. —frequently called the CPU —a chip device about buying one and using it.
consisting of electronic circuitry that executes Note: All the system components you or anyone
instructions to process data. else chooses must be compatible —in other
Sur vival Tip Storage operation: Storage is of two types— words, each brand must work with other brands. If
• you work with one company— such as Dell or
temporary (primary) storage and Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Apple or Asus—to
Storage is permanent
covered in detail in (secondary) storage. Primary storage , or customize your system, you won’t have to worry
Chapter 4. about compatibility. If you choose all the
memory, is the internal computer circuitry
(chips) that temporarily holds data waiting to components yourself—for example, by going to a
be processed. Secondary storage , simply called computer-parts seller such as ComputerGeeks.com
storage, refers to the devices and media that ( www.geeks .com )—you will have to check on
store data or information permanently. A hard compatibility as you choose each component. And
disk or CD/DVD is an example of this kind of you’ll have to make sure each component comes
storage. (Storage also holds the software—the with any necessary cables, instructions, and
computer programs.) component-specific software (called a driver ) that
Output operation: Output is whatever is allows the component to run (the software
•
Sur vival Tip output from (“put out of”) the “drives” the device).
computer system This section of the chapter gives you a brief
—the results of processing, usually overview of the components, which are all
Output is
covered in detail in
information. Examples of output are numbers or covered in detail in Chapters 2–6. We describe
Chapter 5. pictures displayed on a screen, words printed on them in the following order: (1) input hard ware
paper by a printer, digital files stored on a CD, (keyboard and mouse); (2) processing and
and music piped over loudspeakers. memory hardware; (3) storage hardware (disk
drives); (4) output hardware (video and sound

Sur vival Tip

cards, monitor, speakers, and printer); (5)
Communications are covered in detail in Chapters
2, 6, and 7.
• Communications operation: These days, most communications hardware (the modem); and (6)
(though not all) computers have software (system and application).
communications
ability, which offers an extension capability—in
other words, it extends the power of the Input Hardware: Keyboard & Mouse
computer. With wired or wireless communications The two principal input devices are the
connections, data may be input from afar,
processed in a remote area, stored in several keyboard and the mouse.
different locations, and output in yet other places. Input hardware consists of devices that allow
However, you don’t need communications ability
Sur vival Tip to write letters, do calculations, or perform many
people to put
other computer tasks. data into the computer in a form that the computer
can use.
Hardware Info These five operations are summarized in the For most computers used at school and in offices,
For a listing of most
at a mini
types of hardware, illustration at right. ( mum you will need two things: a keyboard and a
their descriptions, ratings, and prices, and the names of • See Panel 1.7.) mouse.
sellers, go to:
http://reviews.cnet.com/
www.juggle.com/computers/
Customizing a Desktop Computer: KEYBOARD On a microcomputer, a keyboard is
hardware-and-software/ Basic Knowledge of How a the primary
www.pcmag.com/ Computer Works input device. A keyboard is an input device that
converts
 2 system unit
Processing: Once in the CD/DVD drive
computer, data can be
processed—numbers
compared or sorted, text hard-disk drive (hidden)
formatted, images or sounds
edited.

1 camera, or video camera). The input data may be mouse

text, numbers, images, and/or sounds.

Storage: Data and programs not currently being

used are held in storage. Primary storage is
keyboa computer circuitry. Secondary storage is usually
rd some kind of disk (such as hard disk or CD/DVD)
Input: You input data into or tape.
the
computer, using a keyboard, mouse, or other
device (such as a scanner, microphone, still 3

5 or other device.
Communications: Often data
or information can be transmitted

4
by modem to or from other
computers, as via email or
posting to a website.

modem
(This one is external
and wireless.
monitor
Modems are usually
internal—on a circuit card
letters, numbers, and other
inside the system unit.) characters into electrical signals
readable by the processor. A microcomputer key board looks like a
typewriter keyboard, but besides having

Output: Processed information is output on a monitor, speakers, printer,

 speakers
Introduction to Information Technology
keys for letters and numbers, it has several specific tasks. After other com
keys (such as F keys and Ctrl, Alt, and Del keys) intended for computer- printer

ponents are assembled, the keyboard will be plugged into the back of the the motherboard.
computer in a socket intended for that purpose. (Cordless keyboards work
differently, as, of course, do smartphone keypads.) The brains of the computer are the processing and memory devices, which
are installed in the case, also called the system cabinet or system unit.
MOUSE A mouse is a nonkeyboard input device (“pointing device”) that
is used to manipulate objects viewed on the CASE & POWER SUPPLY Also known as the system unit , the case or
computer display screen. The mouse cord is system cabinet is the box that houses the processor chip (CPU), the
plugged into the back of the computer or into the memory chips, the motherboard (main circuit board), the power
back of the supply, and some secondary-storage devices —hard disk drive and CD or
keyboard after the other components are DVD drive, as we will explain. The case generally
assembled. Cordless comes in desktop or tower models. It includes a
mice are also available. power supply unit and a fan to keep the circuitry
In the next few years, it’s possible the mouse will from overheating.
be made
obsolete by the touch-screen interface, as with the Asus Vivo PROCESSOR CHIP It may be small and not look
Book laptop and Lenovo’s ThinkPad Twist, and even the gesture like much,
interface, with our hands, moving through the air, sending com but it could be the most expensive hardware
component of
panel 1.7 a build-it-yourself PC—and doubtless the most
Basic operations of a computer. (Many more components can be added; important.
these operations are illustrated in more detail in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.) A processor chip (CPU, for central processing
unit) is a
tiny piece of silicon that contains millions of
miniature
electronic circuits. The speed at which a chip processes
Mouse information is expressed in megahertz (MHz), millions of
mands to the computer. 98 (We discuss this further in Chapter 5.) processing cycles per second, or gigahertz (GHz), billions
29 of processing cycles per second. The faster the processor, the
more expensive it is.

MEMORY CHIPS These chips are also small. Memory chips ,

also
Memory chip
(RAM chip)

Case
Memory chips mounted
on module
Connecting strip that
plugs into a socket in
the motherboard
Memory chip
known as RAM (random access memory) chips, represent primary
storage, or temporary, storage; they hold data before processing and
Processor chip information after processing, before it is sent along to an out put or
storage device. You’ll want enough memory chips to hold at least 2–5
Processing & Memory Hardware: Inside the System gigabytes, or roughly 2–5 billion characters, of data, which is adequate for
most student purposes. Students into heavy graphics use and game playing
A computer’s processing and memory devices are will need more memory. (We will explain the numbers used to measure
Cabinet storage capacities in a moment.)
inside the com
puter case on the main circuit board, called MOTHERBOARD Also called the system board, the motherboard is the
main circuit board in the computer. This is the big (usually) green circuitboard to which everything else—such as the keyboard,
mouse, and printer—attaches through connections (called ports ) in the back of the com
puter. The processor chip and memory chips are also installed on the motherboard.
The motherboard has expansion slots —for expanding the PC’s capabilities—which
give you places to plug in additional or upgraded circuit boards, such as those for
video, sound, and communications (modem). (
• See Panel 1.8.)
PUTTING THE COMPONENTS TOGETHER Now the components can be put together.
As the illustration at right shows, ❶ the memory chips are plugged into the motherboard.
Then ❷ the processor chip is plugged into the motherboard. Now ❸ the motherboard is
attached to the system cabinet. Then ❹ the power supply unit is connected to the system
cabinet. Finally, ❺ the wire for the power switch, which turns the computer on and off, is
connected to the motherboard.

Storage Hardware: Hard Drive & CD/DVD Drive

Chapter 1
Computers can have several types of storage devices.
With the motherboard in the system cabinet, the next step is installation of the storage
hardware. Whereas memory chips deal only with temporary storage, secondary storage, or
permanent storage, stores your data for as long as you want.
30
Motherboard

Expansion
slots

2
BIOS chip
Plug microprocessor chip into motherboard

5
1
Plug memory
chips into
Built-in fan to cool
motherboard the microprocessor

CD/DVD
drive

3
 Power
switch

Attach power switch

motherboard to system cabinet
5 Connect wire to System cabinet

4 Connect power

supply unit
(includes fan)

Hard-disk

Keyboard Mouse of text) 1 terabyte 5 more than 1 trillion characters (about 1

million thick books) 1 petabye 5 about 1 quadrillion characters
For today’s student purposes, you’ll need a hard drive and a CD/DVD (about 180 Libraries of Congress) 1 exabyte 5 about 1 quintillion
drive. These stor age devices slide into the system cabinet from the front characters (about 180,000 Libraries of Congress) 1 zettabyte 5 about
and are secured with screws. Each drive is attached to the motherboard by a 1 sextillion characters (180 million Libraries of Congress Source:
cable. Also, each drive must be hooked up to a plug extending from the www.wisegeek.org/how-much-text-is-in-a-kilobyte-or
power supply.
A computer system’s data/information storage capacity is represented by megabyte.htm ).
drive
bytes, kilo bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and
zettabytes, as follows:
panel 1.8
1 byte 5 1 character of data (A character can be alphabetic—A,
B, or C—or numeric—1, 2, or 3—or a special character—!, ?, *, $, %.) Putting the components
together
1 kilobyte 5 1,024 characters (about ½ page of text)
1 megabyte 5 1,048,576 characters (about 500 pages of text) Introduction to Information Technology
1 gigabyte 5 more than 1 billion characters (about 500,000 pages 31
HARD-DISK DRIVE A hard-disk drive is a device that stores billions of characters of
data on a nonremovable disk platter. With 500 gigabytes of storage, you should be able
to handle most student needs. (Many hard-disk drives store up to 4 terabytes of data.)
CD/DVD DRIVE A CD (compact disk) new software is generally sup plied on CDs or downloaded via the Internet.
drive , or its more recent variant, a DVD (Note that “disk” is sometimes spelled “disc.”)
(digital video disk) drive , is a storage CD/DVD disk
device that uses laser technol
ogy to read data from optical disks. Today
CD/DVD drive (inside system unit)
 SOUND CARD To listen to music and sound connector. The power cord for the monitor will be
Chapter 1 32 effects on your PC, you’ll need a sound card , plugged into a wall plug
which enhances the computer’s sound-
generating capabilities by allowing sound to be SPEAKERS Speakers are the devices that play
output through speakers, either built into the sounds transmitted as electrical signals from
computer or connected externally . This card, too, the sound card. They may not be very
would be plugged into an expansion slot on the sophisticated, but unless you’re into high-fidelity
motherboard. With the CD drive connected to the recordings they’re probably good enough. The
card, you can listen to music CDs. speakers are either built into the computer or
Monitor
connected to a single wire that is plugged into the
MONITOR As with television sets, the inch back of the computer.
dimension on monitors is measured diago nally
corner to corner. The monitor is the display
device that takes the electrical signals from the
video card and forms an image using points of
colored light on the screen. Later, after the
system cabinet has been closed up, the monitor
will be connected by means of a cable to the back
External speakers of the computer, using the clearly marked
PRINTER Especially for student work, you certainly need a printer , an to the one
power “on” button. Your microcomputer system will look similar
output device that produces text and graphics on paper. There are
various types of printers, as we dis cuss later. The printer has two shown below . (
connections. One, which relays signals from the computer, goes to the back
• See Panel 1.9.) Are you now ready to roll? Not quite.
of the PC, where it connects with the motherboard. (Wireless printers are
also available.) The other is a power cord that goes to a wall plug. Color Software
printers are more expensive than black-and-white printers, and fast printers Computers use two basic types of software: system
cost more than slow ones. software and application software.
Communications Hardware: Modem After the computer has been assembled, it will be tested. But first the
software, the electron ically encoded instructions that tell the computer
Computers often need some kind of modem in order to hardware what to do, must be installed. ( Installation is the process of
communicate and become part of a network. copying software programs from a main secondary-storage
Computers can be stand-alone machines, unconnected to anything else. If
all you’re doing is word processing to write term papers, you can do it with
a stand-alone system. As we have seen, however, the communications
component of the computer system vastly extends the range of a PC. Thus,
while the system cabinet is still open, there is one more piece of hardware
to install.

MODEM A standard modem is a device that sends and receives data

over telephone lines, or wirelessly via a network, to and from comput
ers. The modem is sometimes mounted on an expansion card, which is
fitted into an expansion slot on the motherboard; sometimes the modem is Printer
wired directly into the motherboard. (Other types of computer
communications connections are discussed in Chapters 2 and 6.)
Now the system cabinet is closed up. The person building or custom izing
the system will plug in all the input and output devices and turn on the
 Modem expansion card

Processor, memory,
hard-disk drive, video card, sound card, and
Hard-disk drive
Monitor Speaker CD/DVD drive panel 1.9
modem are Storage
Completely assembled
 inside the system cabinet
Output

Processing

Output

basic PC hardware system (Some of the components will be without wires—that is, will be connected wirelessly.)
Introduction to Information Technology
Output Communications
Memory Input Input

Printer 33
System unit Keyboard Mouse

System software. A
System software for the PC. A version of Microsoft
version of Apple’s OS X system software
source onto the system’s hard disk and some special chips, so that you can Windows 7
have direct access to your hardware.)
Software is what makes the computer worthwhile, what makes it
functional for the user. There are two types— system software and
application software.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE System software enables the computer to perform

essential operating tasks and makes it possible for application software
to run. System software consists of several electronically coded programs.
The most important is the operating system, the master control program
that runs the computer. Examples of operating system (OS) software for the
PC are various Microsoft programs (such as Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8), Application software. Adobe
Unix, and Linux.

Creative Suite, which, among other things, is used to create art, manipulate
photos, and
build websites
Chapter 1
34
The Apple Macintosh microcomputer has its own software, as we explain in
Chapter 3. After the system software is installed, setup software for the
hard drive, the video and sound cards, and the modem must be installed.
These setup programs ( drivers, discussed in Chapter 3) often come on CDs
and can also be downloaded from the Internet.

APPLICATION SOFTWARE Now we’re finally getting somewhere! After the

application software has been installed, the computer can be used for
various activities. Application software enables you to perform specific
tasks—solve problems, perform work, or entertain yourself. For
example, when you prepare a term paper on your computer, you will use a computer today
word processing program. (Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages are two
brands.) Application software is specific to the system software you use. If
you want to run Micro
soft Word for the PC, for instance, you’ll need to first have Microsoft
Windows system software on your system, not Unix or Linux or certain
versions of Apple OS X. Application software comes on CDs packaged in
boxes that include instructions, or it can be downloaded from
manufacturers’ websites on the Internet.
We discuss software in more detail in Chapter 3.

1.6 WHERE IS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY can perform calculations that once required a computer filling an entire
HEADED? room. And with nanotechnology, the trend can only continue. 99
Computers are headed in three basic directions—
miniaturization, faster speeds, and greater affordability— SPEED Thanks to miniaturization and new material used in making
and communications are improving connectivity, processors, computer makers can cram more hardware components into
interactivity, and support of multimedia. their machines, providing faster pro cessing speeds and more data storage
capacity.
How far we have come. At the beginning of the 20th century, most people
thought they would live the same life their parents did. Today most people AFFORDABILITY Processor costs today are only a fraction of what they
aren’t surprised by the pre diction that the Information Age will probably were 15 years ago. A state-of-the-art processor costing less than $1,000
transform their lives beyond recognition. Let’s consider the trends in the provides the same processing power as a huge 1980s computer costing
development of computers and communications and, most exciting, the more than $1 million.
area where they intersect.
These are the three major trends in computers. What about
Computers: Miniaturization, Speed, & Affordability communications?
Computers are becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper.
Since the days of ENIAC, computers have developed in three directions— Communications: Connectivity, Interactivity, &
and are continu ing to do so. Multimedia
Information technology systems are becoming more
MINIATURIZATION Everything has become smaller. ENIAC’s old-
connected and interactive, and they support more and
fashioned radio-style vacuum tubes gave way after 1947 to the smaller, more kinds of multimedia.
faster, more reliable transistor. A transis tor is a small device used as a
gateway to transfer electrical signals along predetermined paths (circuits). Once upon a time, we had the voice telephone system—a one-to-one
The next step was the development of tiny integrated circuits. Integrated medium. You could talk to your Uncle Joe, he could talk to you, and with
circuits are entire collections of electric circuits or pathways that are now special arrangements (conference calls) more than two people could talk
etched on tiny squares (chips) of silicon half the size of your thumbnail. with one another. We also had radio and television systems—one-to-many
Silicon is a natural element found in sand. In its pure form, it is the base media (or mass media). News announcers could talk to you on a single
material for computer processing devices. (All these items are discussed in medium such as television, but you couldn’t talk to them.
detail in Chapter 4.) Three recent developments in communications include:
The miniaturized processor, or microprocessor, in a personal desktop
CONNECTIVITY Connectivity refers to the connection of computers to
one another by a communications line in order to provide online
information access and/or the shar ing of peripheral devices. The
connectivity resulting from the expansion of computer net works has made
possible email and online shopping, for example.

INTERACTIVITY Interactivity refers to two-way communica

tion; the user can respond to information he or she receives and
modify what a computer is doing. That is, there is an exchange
or dialogue between the user and the computer, and the computer
responds to user requests. A noninteractive program, once started,
continues without requiring human contact, or interaction. The
ability to interact means users can be active rather than passive
participants in the technological process. On the television net
works MSNBC or CNN, for example, you can immediately go on
the Internet and respond to news from broadcast anchors. Today,
most application software is interactive. We already have cars that
have computers built into the dashboard that can respond to voice Introduction to
commands. Information Technology
MULTIMEDIA Radio is a single-dimensional medium (sound), as is most
Miniaturization. ( left ) Worker email (mainly text). As mentioned earlier, multimedia
wearing Golden-i headset. Interactivity. A dashboard touch-screen computer allows drivers to
The Golden-i unit is operated request information about the car’s operation, their location, and any
by voice commands and nearby services.
head movements and allows 35
the wearer to access vital
information without using
his or her hands. The device
also offers the ability to see
through walls, thanks to infrared technology. ( right ) M2A Imaging Capsule, a
miniature camera
and transmitter that can be
swallowed by a patient to give physicians a wireless real-time view of the patient’s
digestive tract. The capsule transmits
the images to a device, worn
on the patient’s belt, which can be downloaded into a specially configured
computer.
refers to technology that presents information in more than one medium—such as
text, pictures, video, sound, and animation—in a single integrated communication.
The development of the World Wide Web expanded the Internet to include pictures, sound,
music, and so on, as well as text.

Exciting as these developments are, truly mind-boggling possibilities have emerged as

computers and communications have cross-pollinated.

When Computers & Communications Converge:

Portability, Personalization, Collaboration, Cloud
Computing, & Artificial Intelligence
Information technology systems have moved away from stand-alone
personal hardware to more extensive networks and smaller devices,
as well as use of massive online storage.
Sometime in the 1990s computers and communications started to converge, beginning
a new era within the Information Age. Convergence describes the combining of several
industries through various devices that exchange data in the format used by computers.
The industries are computers, communications, consumer electronics, entertainment, and
mass media. Convergence has led to electronic products that perform multiple functions,
such as TVs with Internet access, cellphones that are also digital cameras, and a refrigera
tor that allows you to send email.
Convergence has led to five additional developments:

PORTABILITY In the 1980s portability, or mobility, meant trading off computing power
 and convenience in return for smaller size and weight. Today, however, we are at the point
where we don’t have to give up anything. As a result, experts have predicted that small,
powerful, wireless personal electronic devices will transform our lives far more than the
personal computer has done so far. “The new generation of machines will be truly personal
computers, designed for our mobile lives,” wrote one journalist two decades ago. “We
will read office memos between strokes on the golf course and answer messages from our
children in the middle of business meetings.” 100 Today, of course, smartphones and tablets
make such activities commonplace.

PERSONALIZATION Personalization is the creation of information tailored to your

preferences—for instance, programs that will automatically cull recent news and informa
tion from the Internet on just those topics you have designated. Companies can send you
messages about forthcoming products based on your pattern of purchases, usage, and other
criteria. Or they will build products (cars, computers, clothing) customized to suit your tastes.

COLLABORATION A more recent trend is mass collaboration. Says technology writer John
Markoff, “A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly,
and sometimes enhance it along the way.” 101 Another writer observed that the huge numbers of
people “online worldwide—along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputa
tions, computing power, and more—are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented
power.” 102 Examples are file-sharing, photo-sharing websites, calendar-sharing services,
group-edited informational (encyclopedic) sites called wikis, social-networking services, and
so-called citizen-journalism sites, in which average people write their own news items on the
Internet and comment on what other people post—an interactive, democratic form of mass
media. 103 Pooled ratings, for instance, enable people to create personalized Internet music
radio stations or Amazon.com’s millions of customer-generated product reviews.

Chapter 1
CLOUD COMPUTING: THE GLOBAL COMPUTER Previously called on-demand
computing, grid computing, or software as a service, cloud computing basically
means that instead of storing your software and/or data on your own PC or your
own company’s computers, you store it on servers on the Internet.104 You don’t

36

info!
managed by the provider (the consumer/user needs
nothing but a more
personal
computer/mobile More on Cloud
device and Computing
Internet access). A
“cloud” (the server www.20thingsilearned.com/ cloud-computing/1/
Cloud computing involves delivering services over the http://searchcloudcomputing. techtarget.com/definition/ cloud-
business
Internet. The name cloud computing was inspired by computing/
connected to the
the cloud symbol that’s often used to represent the www.wikinvest.com/concept/ Cloud_Computing/
Internet) can be
Internet in professional diagrams. Cloud services are www.youtube.com/
private or public.
usually sold on demand, typically by the minute or the watch?v 5 uYGQcmZUTaw
hour; users can have as much or as little of a service as
they want at any given time; and the service is fully
care where the servers are located; they’re out there somewhere— “in the cloud”—run by special cloud-service businesses, such as Amazon Web
Services, Rackspace, Google, and Microsoft. The idea here is that companies can tap into computers/servers as they are needed, just as they do now
with the electric power grid, split ting their computing workload among data centers in different parts of the world. The expectation of technology
experts is that companies will find cloud computing cheaper and easier than man aging their own microcomputers, servers, and software (although
security is a worry). 105 Google, says one technology writer, is bet ting that its touch-screen Chromebook laptop will “propel the shift toward a
computing model where most of our applications and data live online” in the cloud. 106

“BIG DATA” & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Ninety percent of the data in the world today was created in just the last two years, accord ing to an IBM
source. “This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase
transaction records, and cellphone . . . signals, to name a few. This data is Big Data. ” 107
More formally, Big Data is data that is so large and complex that it cannot be processed using conventional methods, such as ordinary database
management software. The data may consist of not only traditional sources for the study of words, such as books, news articles, and academic journals,
but also websites, Twitter messages, and blog posts. 108 With companies doing computing “in the cloud” and providing tools for mobile users, the
economics of processing huge amounts of data or providing access for millions of users has become considerably cheaper. 109
The combination of cloud-computing storage of Big Data, along

Introduction to Information Technology

According to inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, technological change will become so rapid and so profound that human bodies and brains will merge with
machines.

with the tremendous processing power of supercomputers, takes us into a world of

machine learning, in which computers can derive meaning and make predictions from
things like language, intentions, and behavior—something that Microsoft, for instance, is
doing with a cloud-computing system called Azure. 110 Machine learning is a branch of
artificial intelligence (AI) , a group of related technologies used for developing
machines to emulate human qualities, such as learning, reasoning, communicating,
seeing, and hearing. Much of AI is based on the use of algorithms , formulas or sets of
steps for solving particular problems.

37
 www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/ materials/ecycling/ language.
Chapter 1 38 www.recycles.org/
Sur vival Tip http://ww1.pcdisposal.com/
“E” Also Stands for Ethics
www.computerhope.com/disposal. htm

Be
Many important ethical issues are
Ethical about
Disposing of Old involved in the use of informa
Computer
tion
Equipment ethics technology.
Just got a new
computer?
Every computer user will have to wrestle with
Where to donate or ethical issues related to the use of informa tion
recycle your old one? technology. Ethics is defined as a set of moral
Check with
schools, after-school more
programs, churches,
info! values or principles that govern the conduct of
an individual or a group. Because ethical
and the following questions arise so often in connec tion with
websites: The 10 Commandments of Computer Ethics information technology, we will note them,
www.crc.org/ The Computer Ethics Institute says: wherever they appear in this book, with the
symbol shown at left. Below, for example, are
1. Thou shalt not use a com puter to harm other people. 2.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic. com/geopedia/E-Waste Thou shalt not interfere with other people’s computer work. 3.
some important ethical concerns pointed out by
http://earth911.com/recycling/ electronics/computers/ Thou shalt not snoop around in other people’s computer files. Tom Forester and Perry Morrison in their book
4. Thou shalt not use a com puter to steal. Computer Ethics.112 These considerations are only
5. Thou shalt not use a com puter to bear false witness. 6.
Thou shalt not copy or use proprietary software for which you
a few of many; we’ll discuss others in subsequent
have not paid. chapters.
7. Thou shalt not use other people’s computer resources
without authorization or proper compensation. SPEED & SCALE Great amounts of information
8. Thou shalt not appropriate other people’s intellectual
output. 9. Thou shalt think about the social consequences of can be stored, retrieved, and transmitted at a
the program you are writing or the system you are designing. speed and on a scale not possible before,
10. Thou shalt always use a computer in ways that ensure especially now in the era of cloud comput ing and
consideration and respect for your fellow humans. Big Data. Despite the benefits, this has serious
Source: http://computerethics institute.org/images/ The Ten implications “for data security and personal
Commandments Of Computer Ethics.pdf.
TECH TALES Artificial Intelligence: The Use of privacy,” as well as employment, Forester and
Morrison say, because information technology
Algorithms to Create a Hit Song
can never be considered totally secure against
In 2004, guitarist-songwriter New Zealander Ben unauthorized access.
Novak, hoping to land a record deal, came across
a website that claimed, for $50, to provide an UNPREDICTABILITY Computers and
algorithm that would find hit songs. The communications are pervasive, touching nearly
algorithm, which compared the structure of his every aspect of our lives. However, at this point,
song with those of the past, gave his song, “Turn compared to other pervasive technologies— such
Your Car Around,” a high rating for hit potential— as electricity, television, and automobiles—
on a level with such standards as the Eagles’
information technology seems a lot less
“Take It Easy” and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be
predictable and reliable.
Wild.” The algorithm’s owner, Mike McCready,
connected Novak with a record label, and the
song eventually ended up near the top of the COMPLEXITY Computer systems are often
European popular music charts. incredibly complex—some so complex that they
are not always understood even by their creators.
The same algorithm, incidentally, predicted the “This,” say Forester and Morrison, “often makes
success of the band Maroon 5 and the artist
them completely unmanageable,” producing
Norah Jones before they became stars. 111
massive foul-ups or spectacu larly out-of-control
There are several fields of AI, among them the costs.
following. Pattern recognition identi fies recurring
patterns and recognizes the connections between Ethics and security can often be talked about in
the patterns and similar patterns stored in a the same breath, since secure computer systems
database, as was the case with the McReady obviously go a long way toward keeping people
algorithm. Virtual reality is computer-generated ethical and honest. When we discuss security,
artificial reality that projects a person into a you will see the icon below.
sensation of three dimensional space. Robotics is
the development and study of machines that can
perform work that is normally done by people.
Natural language processing is the study of ways
for computers to recognize and understand human
SECURITY
EXPERIENCE BOX
Better Organization & Time Management:
Dealing with the Information Deluge in
College—& in Life
Devote the First 1½ Hours of Your Day

A
to Your Most Important Task. Writing a
paper? Studying a hard subject? Make it your first task of the day,
and concentrate on it for 90 minutes. After that, your brain will
n Experience Box appears at the end of each chapter. probably need a rest, and you can answer email, return phone calls,
and so on. But until that first break, don’t do anything else, because
Each box offers you the opportunity to acquire useful experience it can take the brain 20 minutes to refocus.
that directly applies to the Digital Age. This first box illustrates
skills that will benefit you in college,
Improving Your Memory Ability
in this course and others. (Students reading the first 10 edi tions of our
book have told us they received substantial benefit from these Memorizing is, of course, one of the principal requirements for
suggestions.) succeeding in college. And it’s a great help for success in life afterward.
Some suggestions:
“How on earth am I going to be able to keep up with what’s required of Space Your Studying, Rather Than Cramming. Cramming— making a
me?” you may ask yourself. “How am I going to handle the information frantic, last-minute attempt to memorize massive amounts of
glut?” The answer is by learning how to learn. By building your skills as a material—is probably the least effective means
learner, you certainly help yourself do better in college, and you also train of absorbing information. Research shows that it’s best to space out
yourself to be an information manager in the future. your studying of a subject over successive days. A series of study
sessions over several days is preferable to trying to do it all during the
Using Your “Prime Study Time” same number of hours on one day. It is repetition that helps to move
Each of us has a different energy cycle. The trick is to use it effectively. infor mation into your long-term memory bank.
That way, your hours of best performance will coin cide with your heaviest Review Information Repeatedly—Even “Overlearn” It. By repeatedly
academic demands. For example, if your energy level is high during the reviewing information—known as “ rehearsing”—you can improve both
evenings, you should plan to do your studying then. your retention and your understanding of it. Overlearning is continuing
To capitalize on your prime study time, take the following steps: (1) to review material even after you appear to have absorbed it. Also,
Make a study schedule for the entire term, and indicate the times each recent research studies show that taking a test after reading a block of
day during which you plan to study. (2) Find some good places to study— material improves recall of the mate rial, even a week later. This
places where you can avoid distractions. (3) Avoid time wasters, but give method seems to work better than simple reading, reading the block in
yourself frequent rewards for studying, such as a TV show, a favorite piece segments, and concept mapping (creating a diagram of the concepts
of music, or a conversation with a friend.
Introduction to Information Technology
Learning to Focus after one has finished reading the block of material). 117 Use
Multitasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid Memorizing Tricks. There are several ways to orga nize information so
succession. When you read this textbook while listening to music and that you can retain it better. For exam ple, you can make drawings or
watching TV, you may think you’re simultaneously doing three separate diagrams (as of the parts of a computer system). Some methods of
tasks, but you’re really not. “It’s like playing tennis with three balls,” says establishing associations between items you want to remember are
one expert. 113 Today multitasking is easy and focus is hard because of all
the things demanding our attention—phone calls, email, text messages, given on the next page . (
music, radio, TV, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, various blogs and websites.
• See Panel 1.10 .)
“You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every email
message instantly,” says one writer. “Or you can rec ognize your brain’s Improving Your Reading Ability: The SQ3R Method SQ3R stands
finite capacity for processing information.” 114 for “survey, question, read, recite, and review.” 118 The strategy behind
Here are some tips on learning to concentrate: 115 the method is to break down a reading assignment into small segments
and master each before moving on. The five steps of the SQ3R method
Choose What to Focus On. “People don’t realize that attention is a are as follows:
finite resource, like money,” one expert says. “Do you want to invest
your cognitive cash on end less Twittering or Net surfing or couch 1. Survey the chapter before you read it: Get an overview of the chapter
potatoing [watching TV]?” She adds, “Where did the idea come from before you begin reading it. If you have a sense of what the material is
that any one who wants to contact you can do so at any time? You about before you begin read
need to take charge of what you pay attention to instead of responding 39
to the latest stimuli.” 116 For example, to block out noise, you can wear ing it, you can predict where it is going. In this text, we
earplugs while reading.
• Mental and physical imagery: Use your visual and other senses to construct a personal image of what you want to
remember. Indeed, it helps to make the image humorous, action-filled, or outrageous in order to establish a
personal connection. Example: To remember the name of the 21st president of the United States, Chester
 Arthur, you might visualize an author writing the number “21” on a wooden chest. This mental image helps you
associate chest (Chester), author (Arthur), and 21 (21st president).
• Acronyms and acrostics: An acronym is a word created from the first letters of items in a list. For instance, Roy G.
Biv helps you remember the colors of the rainbow in order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. An
acrostic is a phrase or sentence created from the first letters of items on a list. For example, Every Good Boy
Does Fine helps you remember that the order of musical notes on the treble staff is E-G-B-D-F.
• Location: Location memory occurs when you associate a concept with a place or imaginary place. For example,
you could learn the parts of a computer system by imagining a walk across campus. Each building you pass could
be associated with a part of the computer system.
• Word games: Jingles and rhymes are devices frequently used by advertisers to get people to remember their
products. You may recall the spelling rule “I before E except after C or when sounded like A as in neighbor or
weigh.” You can also use narrative methods, such as making up a story.

panel 1.10
Some memorizing tricks

offer on the first page of every chapter a list of the main headings 40
and accompanying key questions. At the end of each chapter we you formulated.
offer a review of terms and explanations. Clearly the SQ3R method takes longer than simply reading with a
2. Question the segment in the chapter before you read it: This step is rapidly moving color marker or underlining pencil. How ever, the technique
easy to do, and the point, again, is to get you involved in the material. is far more effective because it requires your involvement and
After surveying the entire chapter, go to the first segment—whether a understanding. These are the keys to all effective learning.
whole section, a sub section, or even just a paragraph, depending on the
level of difficulty and density of information. Look at the topic head ing Learning from Lectures
of that segment (or first sentence of a very difficult para graph). In your Does attending lectures really make a difference? Research concludes
mind, restate the heading as a question. that students with grades of B or above were more apt to have better
After you have formulated the question, go to steps 3 and 4 class attendance than students with grades of C– or below. 119
(read and recite). Then proceed to the next segment of the Some tips for getting the most out of lectures:
chapter, and restate the heading there as a question, and so on. Take Effective Notes by Listening Actively. Research shows that good
3. Read the segment about which you asked the question: When you
test performance is related to good note taking. 120 And good note
read the segment you asked the question about, read with purpose, to
taking requires that you listen actively—that is, participate in the
answer the question you formulated. Underline or color-mark sentences
lecture process. Here are some ways to take good lecture notes:
that you think are important, if they help you to answer the ques tion.
Read this portion of the text more than once, if necessary, until you can • Read ahead and anticipate the lecturer: Try to antici pate what the
answer the question. In addition, determine whether the segment instructor is going to say, based on your previous reading. Having
covers any other signifi cant questions, and formulate answers to these background knowledge makes learning more efficient.
too. After you have read the segment, proceed to step 4. (Perhaps you • Listen for signal words: Instructors use key phrases such as, “The most
can see where this is all leading. If you read in terms of questions and important point is . . . ,” “There are four reasons for . . . ,” “The chief
answers, you will be better prepared when you see exam questions reason . . . ,” “Of special importance . . . ,” “Consequently. . . .” When you
about the material later.) hear such signal phrases, mark your notes with a ! or *.
4. Recite the main points of the segment: Recite means “say aloud.” • Take notes in your own words: Instead of just being a stenographer, try
Thus, you should speak out loud (or softly) the answer to the principal to restate the lecturer’s thoughts in your own words, which will
question or questions about make you pay attention more.
Chapter 1 • Ask questions: By asking questions during the lecture, you necessarily
the segment and any other main points. participate in it and increase your understanding.
5. Review the entire chapter by repeating questions: After you have Review Your Notes Regularly. Make it a point to review your notes
read the chapter, go back through it and review the main points. Then, without regularly—perhaps on the afternoon after the lecture, or once or twice
a week. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of this kind of
looking at the book, test your memory by repeating the questions and answers
reviewing.

TERMS & EXPLANATIONS

algorithm (p. 37) Formula, procedure, or set of steps for solving a particular application software (p. 34) Software that enables you to per form specific
problem. Why it’s important: Algorithms are essen tially the foundation, the tasks—solve problems, perform work, or entertain yourself. Why it’s
building blocks, of computer science. Much of AI is based on the use of important: Application software such as word processing, spreadsheet,
algorithms, as is software code. database management, graphics, and communications packages are
commonly used tools for increas ing people’s productivity. ( Apps is short for
“applications.”) communications lines to provide online informa tion access and/or the
sharing of peripheral devices. Why it’s important: Connectivity is the
artificial intelligence (AI) (p. 37) Group of related technologies used for foundation of the advances in the Information Age. It provides online
developing machines to emulate human qualities, such as learning, access to countless types of information and services. The connectivity
reasoning, communicating, seeing, and hearing. Why it’s important: Given the resulting from the expansion of computer networks has made possible
potential of artificial intelligence, it will likely have far-reaching effects on email and online shopping, for example.
human life in the years to come; the studies of the creation of intelligence
involve a con tinual process to eventually solve many problems. cyberspace (p. 17) Area that includes not only the online world and the
Internet in particular but also the whole wired and wire less world of
avatar (p. 6) Computer depiction of a human, often found in online communications in general. Why it’s important: More and more human
videogames. Why it’s important: Avatars can be helpful in training, such as by activities take place in cyberspace.
representing imaginary customers.
data (p. 27) Raw facts and figures that are processed into information. Why
Big Data (p. 37) Data that is so large and complex that it cannot be processed it’s important: Users need data to create useful information.
using conventional methods. Why it’s important: The amount of data in our
world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—Big Data—has database (p. 11) Computer system with a collection of inter related files that is
become a key basis of business competition, productivity growth, and
designed and built for a specific purpose; technology for pulling together facts that
innovation. Managing Big Data has also become critical to the functioning of
allows the slicing and dicing and mixing and matching of data. Why it’s important:
government.
Introduction to Information Technology
blogs (weblogs) (p. 14) Frequently updated sites on the World Wide Web
Businesses and organizations build databases to help them to track and
intended for public consumption that contain a writer’s observations,
manage their affairs. In addition, online database services put enormous
opinions, images, and links to other web sites. Why it’s important: Blogs are
research resources at the user’s disposal.
used, for example, for low cost marketing, improving writing skills, trying out
new ideas with people, getting experience in certain areas before looking for
a job, satisfying one’s need for creativity, and for putting something desktop PC (p. 24) Microcomputer unit that sits on a desk, with the
interesting out into the world. keyboard in front and the monitor often on top. Why it’s important: Desktop
PCs and tower PCs are the most commonly used types of microcomputer.
case (p. 30) Also known as the system unit or system cabinet; the box that
houses the processor chip (CPU), the memory chips, the motherboard, the distance learning (p. 5) Also known as e-learning and online learning; name
power supply, and storage devices— hard-disk drive and CD or DVD drive. Why given to online education programs. Why it’s important: Provides students
it’s important: The case protects many important processing and storage increased flexibility because they do not have to be in an actual classroom.
components. Online classes are becom ing increasingly popular.

CD (compact disk) drive (p. 32) Storage device that uses laser technology to downloading (p. 20) Transferring data from a remote computer to one’s own
read data from optical disk. Why it’s important: New software is often supplied computer. Why it’s important: Allows text, music, 41
on CDs, in addition to being down loaded from websites. The newest version is and images to be transferred quickly by telecommunications.
called DVD (digital video disk). The DVD format stores more data than the CD DVD (digital video disk) drive See CD (compact disk) drive. e-learning See
format.
distance learning.
central processing unit (CPU) See processor chip. chip See
email (electronic mail) (p. 5) Messages transmitted over a computer
processor chip.
network, most often the Internet. Why it’s important: Email has become
universal and is heavily used in business and professional work.
clients (p. 26) Computers and other devices connected to a server, a central
computer. Why it’s important: Client-server networks are used in many e-readers (e-book readers) (p. 25) Electronic devices that can download e-
organizations for sharing databases, devices, and programs. books—digital versions of regular books, articles, and magazines from
cloud computing (p. 36) Method of storing your software and/ or data not various suppliers. Why it’s important: E-books are cheaper than print books,
on your own PC or company’s computers but rather on servers on the and e-readers can easily be put in a purse or a pocket. They can download
Internet. Why it’s important: Users could tap into computers as they are books via a wireless network almost anywhere or from a computer and are
needed, distributing computing work load among data centers in different relatively inexpensive.
parts of the world, perhaps
making computing cheaper and more reliable.
ethics (p. 38) Set of moral values or principles that govern the conduct of
an individual or a group. Why it’s important: Ethical questions arise often in
communications technology (p. 4) Also called telecommunica tions connection with information technology.
technology; consists of electromagnetic devices and sys tems for
communicating over any distance. Why it’s important: Communications expansion slots (p. 30) Internal “plugs” used to expand the PC’s
systems using electronic connections have helped expand human capabilities. Why it’s important: Expansion slots give you places to plug in
communication beyond face-to-face meetings. additional circuit boards, such as those for video, sound, and
communications (modem).
computer (p. 4) Programmable, multiuse machine that accepts data—raw
facts and figures—and processes (manipulates) it into useful information, hard-disk drive (p. 32) Device that stores billions of characters of data on a
such as summaries and totals. Why it’s important: Computers greatly nonremovable disk platter usually inside the com puter case. Why it’s
speed up problem solving and other tasks, increasing users’ productivity. important: Hard disks have a very large stor age capacity. Nearly all
microcomputers use hard disks as their principal secondary-storage
connectivity (p. 35) Ability to connect computers to one another by medium.
 hardware (p. 27) All the machinery and equipment in a com puter system. on screen, but viewers still want more pocket-size portability than is possible
Why it’s important: Hardware runs under the control of software and is with a laptop.
useless without it. However, hardware contains the circuitry that allows
processing. modem (p. 33) Device that sends and receives data over tele phone lines or
cable lines, or wirelessly over a network, to and from computers. Why it’s
information (p. 27) Data that has been summarized or other wise important: A modem enables users to transmit data from one computer to
transformed for use in decision making. Why it’s important: The whole another.
purpose of a computer (and communications) system is to produce (and
transmit) usable information. monitor (p. 32) Display device that takes the electrical signals from the video
card and forms an image using points of colored light on the screen. Why it’s
information technology (IT) (p. 3) Technology that helps pro duce, important: Monitors enable users to view output without printing it out.
manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information. Why it’s
important: Information technology is bring ing about the fusion of several motherboard (p. 30) Also called the system board; main circuit board in the
important industries dealing with computers, telephones, televisions, and computer. Why it’s important: This is the big green circuit board to which
various handheld devices. everything else — such as the keyboard, mouse, and printer — is attached. The
processor chip and memory chips are also installed on the motherboard.
input (p. 27) Whatever is put in (“input”) to a computer system. Input
devices include the keyboard, the touch screen, and the mouse. Why it’s mouse (p. 29) Nonkeyboard input device, called a “pointing device,” used to
important: Useful information cannot be pro duced without input data. manipulate objects viewed on the computer display screen. Why it’s
important: For many purposes, a mouse is easier to use than a keyboard
interactivity (p. 35) Two-way communication; a user can respond to for inputting com mands. Also, the mouse is used extensively in many
information he or she receives and modify the process. Why it’s important: graphics programs.
Interactive devices allow the user to actively partici pate in a technological process multimedia (p. 35) From “multiple media”; technology that presents
information in more than one medium—including text, graphics, animation,
instead of just reacting to it. Chapter 1 video, and sound—in a single integrated communication. Why it’s important:
Internet (the “Net” or “net”) (p. 19) Worldwide computer net work that Multimedia is used increas ingly in business, the professions, and education
connects hundreds of thousands of smaller networks linking computers at to improve the way information is communicated.
academic, scientific, and commercial insti tutions, as well as individuals. Why it’s
important: Thanks to the Internet, millions of people around the world can share all nanotechnology (p. 23) Technology whereby molecule-size
types 42 nanostructures are used to create tiny machines for holding data or
of information and services. performing tasks. Why it’s important: Could result in tremendous
keyboard (p. 28) Input device that uses keys to convert letters, numbers, and computer power in molecular-size devices. ( Nano means “one-billionth.”)
other characters into electrical signals readable by the processor. Why it’s
important: Keyboards are the most common kind of input device. netbook (p. 25) Low-cost, lightweight computer with tiny dimen sions and
with functions designed for basic tasks, such as web searching, email, and
local area network (LAN) (p. 24) Network that connects, usu ally by special word processing; weighs 2.25–3.2 pounds. Why it’s important: These
cable and also wirelessly, a group of desktop PCs and other devices, such as cheaper computers fill a tech nological category between notebooks and
printers, in an office or a building. Why it’s important: LANs have replaced handheld devices.
mainframes for many functions and are considerably less expensive.
network (p. 4) Communications system connecting two or more computers.
mainframe (p. 24) Second-largest computer available, after the Why it’s important: Networks allow users to share applications and data
supercomputer; capable of great processing speeds and data storage. Small and to use email. The Internet is the largest network.
mainframes are often called midsize computers. Why it’s important:
Mainframes are used by large organizations (banks, airlines, insurance notebook computer (p. 25) Also called laptop computer; light weight portable
companies, universities) that need to process millions of transactions. computer with a built-in monitor, keyboard, hard disk drive, battery, and
adapter; weighs 1.8–12 pounds. Why it’s important: Notebooks and other
memory chip (p. 30) Also known as RAM (for “random access memory”) small computers have provided users with computing capabilities in the field
chip; primary (temporary) storage. Why it’s important: Holds data before and on the road; however, they are now being displaced by tablets.
processing and information after processing, before it is sent along to an
output or storage device. online (p. 4) Use of a computer or some other information device, connected
through a network, to access information and services from another computer
microcomputer (p. 24) Also called personal computer ( PC ) ; small computer or information device. Why it’s important: Online communication is widely
that fits on or next to a desk or can be carried around. Why it’s important: The used by businesses, services, individuals, and educational institutions.
microcomputer reduced the reli ance on mainframes and has provided more
ordinary users with access to computers. It can be used as a stand-alone online learning See distance learning.
machine or connected to a network and is essential in many businesses and
professions. online relationship site (p. 14) Electronic forum that people may join in the
hope of meeting compatible companions or mates. Why it’s important:
microcontroller (p. 26) Also called an embedded computer; the smallest This is an example of how informa tion technology is changing people’s
category of computer. Why it’s important: Microcon trollers are the tiny, personal lives.
specialized microprocessors built into “smart” electronic devices, such as
appliances and automobiles. output (p. 28) Whatever is output from (“put out of”) the com puter system;
the results of processing. Why it’s important: People use output to help
mobile device (p. 25) Fully Internet-integrated, handheld multi media them make decisions. Without output devices, computer users would not
computer highly compatible with desktop microcomputers and laptops. Why be able to view or use the results of processing.
it’s important: Some mobile devices are too small to adequately view images
peripheral device (p. 32) Any component or piece of equipment that expands speakers (p. 32) Devices that play sounds transmitted as elec trical signals
a computer’s input, storage, or output capabilities. Examples include printers from the sound card. Speakers are connected to a single wire plugged into
and disk drives. Why it’s important: Most computer input and output functions the back of the computer, or they are built into the computer. Why it’s
are performed by peripheral devices. important: See sound card.
43
personal digital assistant (PDA) (p. 25) Also known as hand held computer; supercomputer (p. 23) High-capacity computer with thousands of
used as a schedule planner and address book and to prepare to-do lists and processors; the fastest calculating device ever invented. Costs up to $350
send email and faxes. Why it’s important: PDAs make it easier for people to million or more. Why it’s important: Supercom puters are used primarily for
do business and communicate while traveling. research purposes, airplane design, oil exploration, weather forecasting, and
other activities that can not be handled by mainframes and other less
primary storage (p. 28) Also called memory; internal computer circuitry that powerful machines.
temporarily holds data waiting to be processed.
Why it’s important: By holding data, primary storage enables the processor system software (p. 34) Software that enables the computer to perform
to process. essential operating tasks. Why it’s important: Appli cation software cannot
run without system software. System software consists of several programs.
printer (p. 33) Output device that produces text and graphics on paper. Why The most important is the operating system, the master control program
it’s important: Printers provide one of the principal forms of computer that runs the computer. Examples of operating system software for the PC
output. are various Microsoft programs (Windows), Unix, Linux, and the Macin tosh
operating system.
processing (p. 28) The manipulation a computer does to trans form data
into information. Why it’s important: Processing is the essence of the system unit See case.
computer, and the processor is the computer’s “brain.”
tablet computer (pp. 2, 25) Wireless portable computer, such as Apple’s
processor chip (p. 30) Also called the processor, the CPU (cen tral iPad, primarily operated via a touch screen. Why it’s important: Tablet
processing unit), or simply chip; tiny piece of silicon that con tains millions computers are easy to use and easy to carry around, and they don’t require
of miniature electronic circuits used to process data. Why it’s important: a keyboard. The screen is a 7- to 10-inch touch screen (one can manipulate
Chips have made possible the develop ment of small computers. the screen contents
directly with one’s hand or a stylus.) Tablet computers support
robot (p. 8) Automatic device that performs functions ordinar ily performed multimedia.
by human beings. Why it’s important: Robots help perform tasks that
humans find difficult or impossible to do. terminal (p. 24) Input and output device that uses a keyboard for input and
a monitor for output; it cannot process data. Why it’s important: Terminals
secondary storage (p. 28) Also called storage; devices and media that are generally used to input data to and receive data from a mainframe
store data and programs permanently—such as disks and disk drives, tape computer system.
and tape drives, CDs and CD drives. Why it’s important: Without secondary
storage, users would not be able to save their work. Storage also holds the texting (text messaging) (p. 17) Sending and receiving short written
computer’s software. messages between mobile phones or other portable or

server (p. 26) Also called network server; central computer in a network
that holds collections of data (databases) and programs for connecting
PCs, workstations, and other devices, which are called clients. Why it’s CHAPTER REVIEW
important: Servers enable many users to share equipment, programs, and
data (linked together in a client-server network).
More and more educators are favoring an approach to learn ing
smartphone (p. 2) Cellphone with built-in applications, multi media
(presented by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues in Tax onomy of
capability, and Internet access. Why it’s important: The smartphone has
Educational Objectives) that follows a hierarchy of six critical-thinking
made almost everything we do more portable and immediate.
skills: (a) two lower-order skills—memori zation and comprehension—and
(b) four higher-order skills— application, analysis, synthesis, and
social network (p. 3) Site on the World Wide Web (such as Facebook and Twitter) evaluation. While you may be able to get through many introductory
that allows users to interact and develop communities around similar interests— college courses by simply memorizing facts and comprehending the
and use mobile devices to research products and compare prices. Why it’s basic ideas, to advance further you will probably need to employ the
four higher-order thinking skills.
important: Introduction to Information Technology
In the Chapter Review at the end of each chapter, we have
Social networks—for good or ill—are affecting almost every way people implemented this hierarchy in a three-stage approach, as follows:
interact and how all their personal information is used.
• Stage 1 learning—memorization: “I can recognize and recall
software (p. 27) Also called programs; step-by-step electroni cally encoded information.” Self-test questions, multiple-choice
instructions that tell the computer hardware how to perform a task. Why
it’s important: Without software, hard ware is useless.

sound card (p. 32) Special circuit board that enhances the com puter’s
Chapter 1
fixed devices. Why it’s important: Text messaging is the most widely used
sound-generating capabilities by allowing sound to be output through
data application.
speakers. Why it’s important: Sound is used in multimedia applications.
Also, many users like to listen to music CDs on their computers.
tower PC (p. 24) Microcomputer unit that sits as a “tower,” often on the floor,
freeing up desk space. Why it’s important: Tower PCs and desktop PCs are the
 most commonly used types of microcomputer. of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents in multimedia
form—sounds, photos, and video as well as text. Why it’s important: The web
uploading (p. 20) Transferring data from one’s own computer to a remote is the most widely known part of the Internet.
computer. Why it’s important: Allows text, music, and images to be
transferred quickly by telecommunications.

video card (p. 32) Circuit board that converts the processor’s output
information into a video signal for transmission through a cable to the
monitor. Why it’s important: Virtually all computer users need to be able to
view video output on the monitor. questions, and true-false questions enable you to test how well you
recall basic terms and concepts. • Stage 2 learning—comprehension: “I
virtual (p. 10) Something that is created, simulated, or carried on by means of can recall informa tion in my own terms and explain it to a friend.” Using
a computer or a computer network. Why it’s important: Allows actual objects
open-ended, short-answer questions, we ask you to reex press terms and
to be represented in computer-based form.
concepts in your own words.
workstation (p. 24) Smaller than a mainframe; expensive, pow erful computer • Stage 3 learning—applying, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating: “I can
generally used for complex scientific, mathemati cal, and engineering apply what I’ve learned, relate these ideas to other concepts, build on
calculations and for computer-aided design other knowledge, and use all these thinking skills to form a
judgment.” In this part of the Chapter Review, we ask you to put the
and computer-aided manufacturing. Why it’s important: The power of
ideas into effect using the activities described, some of which
workstations is needed for specialized applications too large and complex to
include Internet activities. The purpose is to help you take possession
be handled by PCs.
of the ideas, make them your own, and apply them realistically to
your life.
World Wide Web (the “Web” or the “web”) (p. 19) The inter connected system

44
s
MEMORIZATION
ta
g
e 1 LEARNING
“I can recognize and recall information.”

Self-Test Questions computer processing devices is , a natural element found in sand.

16. The general term for all the machinery and equipment in a computer
1. The refers to the part of the Internet that presents information in
system is .
multimedia form.
17. The and the are the two most common input devices.
2. “ technology” merges computing with high speed communications.
18. The processor chip, commonly called the or a(n) , is a tiny piece of
3. A(n) is an electronic machine that accepts data and processes it into
silicon that contains millions of miniature electronic circuits.
information.
19. One gigabyte is approximately characters. 20. refers to two-way
4. The is a worldwide network that connects hundreds of thousands of
smaller networks. communication; the user can respond to information received via the
computer and modify what the computer is doing.
5. refers to information presented in nontextual forms such as video,
sound, and graphics. 6. are high-capacity computers with thousands of
processors. Multiple-Choice Questions
7. Embedded computers, or , are installed in “smart” appliances and 1. Which of the following devices converts computer output into displayed
automobiles. images?
8. The kind of software that enables users to perform specific tasks a. printer
is called software.
b. monitor
9. RAM is an example of storage, and a hard drive is an example of c. modem
storage.
d. processor
10. is data that is so large and complex that it cannot be processed using
e. hard-disk drive
conventional methods. 11. A(n) is a communications system connecting
two or more computers. 2. Which of the following computer types is the smallest? a.
12. The four basic operations of all computers are , , , and . mainframe
13. The first programmable computer in the United States, which b. microcomputer
appeared in 1946, was called . 14. The is the display device that takes c. microcontroller
the electrical signals from the video card and forms an image using d. supercomputer
points of colored light on the screen. 15. The base material for e. workstation
3. Which of the following is a secondary-storage device? a. e. processing
processor 6. Supercomputers are used for
b. main memory chip a. breaking codes.
c. hard-disk drive b. simulations for explosions of nuclear bombs. c. forecasting
d. printer weather.
e. modem
Introduction to Information Technology
4. Since the days when computers were first made available, d. keeping planets in orbit.
computers have developed in three directions. What are they? a.
e. all of these
increased expense
f. only a, b, and c.
b. miniaturization
7. What is the leading use of computers?
c. increased size
a. web surfing
d. affordability
b. email, texting, and social networking
e. increased speed
c. e-shopping
5. Which of the following operations constitute the four basic
operations followed by all computers? d. word processing
a. input 8. Which is the main circuit board in the computer? a. RAM
b. storage chip (random access memory)
c. programming b. CPU processor chip (central processing unit) c.
d. output motherboard (system board)
d. hard drive
45
9. A terabyte is approximately system software. T F 4. Processing is the manipulation by which a computer
a. one million characters. transforms data into information.
b. one billion characters. T F 5. Primary storage is the area in the computer where data or
information is held permanently.
c. one trillion characters.
T F 6. The keyboard and the mouse are examples of input devices.
d. one quadrillion characters.
10. Speakers are an example of T F 7. Movies are a form of multimedia.
a. an input device. T F 8. Computers are becoming larger, slower, and more expensive.
b. an output device. T F 9. Modems store information.
c. a processor. T F 10. A hard disk is an example of software. T F 11. Computers
d. a storage device. continue to get smaller and smaller.
T F 12. A modem is a programmable, multiuse machine that accepts
True-False Questions data—raw facts and figures—and processes, or manipulates, it
into information we can use.
T F 1. Microcontrollers process faster than supercomputers. T F 2. Main
T F 13. Online education programs are called computer learning.
memory is a software component. T F 3. The operating system is part of the
T F 14. PDAs are devices that can download books in digital form.

s “I can recall information in my own terms and

ta
g
e 2 LEARNING explain it to a friend.”
COMPREHENSION
Short-Answer Questions 7. What is the difference between microcomputers and supercomputers?
8. What is the function of RAM?
1. What does online mean?
9. What does downloading mean?
2. What is the difference between system software and application
software? 10. What is meant by connectivity?

3. Briefly define cyberspace. 11. Describe some ways that information technology can be used to help
people find jobs and to help jobs find people.
4. What is the difference between software and hardware? 5. What is a local
12. Compare the use of email to the use of the telephone and of
area network? conventional letters sent via the postal system. Which kinds of
6. What is multimedia? communications are best suited for which medium?
13. What is the basic meaning of cloud computing?

s g
ta e
3 LEARNING

APPLYING, ANALYZING, SYNTHESIZING,

EVALUATING
“I can apply what I’ve learned, relate these
ideas to other concepts, build on other
knowledge, and use all these thinking skills to
form a judgment.”
 Knowledge in Action 3. Imagine a business you could start or run at home. What type of
business is it? What type(s) of computer(s) and mobile devices do you
1. Do you wish there was an invention to make your life easier or think you’ll need? Describe the computer system in as much detail as
better? Describe it. What would it do for possible, including hardware components in the areas we have
you? Come up with ideas on how that device may be constructed. discussed so far. Keep your notes, and then refine your answers as
you complete the course.
2. Determine what types of computers are being used where you work
or go to school. In which departments are the different types of computer 4. Has reality become science fiction? Or has science fic tion become
science fact? First, watch an old futuristic movie, such as 2001—A Space
used? Make a list of Chapter 1 Odyssey, and take note of the then-futuristic technology displayed.
the input devices, output devices, and storage devices. What are Classify what you see according to input, output, processing, storage, and
they used for? How are they connected to other computers? Are communications. Then watch a recent science fiction movie, and also list
any offices or departments using cloud services? If yes, do any all the futuristic
users have complaints about using the cloud?
46
technology used according to the given categories. What was can let you “draw” and “paint”; it can be pro grammed to serve as an
futuristic in the old movie that is now real ity? What in the new movie answering machine; and so forth.
is not yet reality but seems already feasible? Imagine a future in which digital electronic devices have replaced all
5. From what you’ve read and what you have experienced and/or the things they can emulate. What benefits to your life can you see
observed in your life, do you have a positive, negative, or impartial in such a future? What things might be worse? What dangers can
view of our rapidly converging technological society? Why? you see? Do you think this kind of radical convergence is likely? If so,
Reevaluate your answers as you work through the course. how long do you think it will take?
6. Computer prices are constantly falling. Whatever you pay for a
computer today, you can be certain that you will be able to buy a more Web Exercises
powerful computer for less money a year from now and, quite possibly,
even just a month from now. So how can you decide when it’s a good If you are not yet familiar with web surfing, wait until you have finished
time to upgrade to a better computer? Paradoxically, it seems that no Chapter 2 to do the following web exercises. 1. Are computers,
matter how you time it, you’ll always lose, because prices will go down
cellphones, and other electronic devices
again soon, and yet you will also always gain, because, since you were
going to upgrade sooner or later anyway, you will reap the benefits of bad for our health? You may have heard the term elec tromagnetic
having the more powerful equipment that much longer. radiation and dismissed it as an obscure scientific term not worth
understanding. Visit the links below to become educated on a topic
Discuss the benefits and costs, both material and psy chological, of that will be dis cussed more seriously and frequently as our society
“waiting until prices drop.” Gather more information on this topic by becomes completely wireless.
asking friends and colleagues which choices they have made about
upgrading equip ment over the years and whether they feel satisfaction or www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cellphones/
regret about the timing when they finally did upgrade. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/devra-davis-phd/cell phone-radiation-
_b_828330.html
7. Computers are almost everywhere, and they affect most walks of life—
business, education, government, mili tary, hobbies, shopping, www.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone-radiation.htm
socializing, research, and so on. What aspects of your life can you www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/Radiation
think of that still seem relatively unaffected by computers and EmittingProductsandProcedures/HomeBusiness
technol ogy? Is this a good thing or a bad thing, and is it likely to andEntertainment/CellPhones/ucm116282.htm
last? What aspects of your life have been the most conspicuously
affected by technology? Has anything been made worse or harder in www.ewg.org/cellphone-radiation/
your life by the advance of computers? What about things that have 2. List some pros and cons of a “paperless” environment. Do you
been made better or easier? believe that a paperless environment is some thing worth striving for in
the workplace? In the home? In the classroom? In banking? Run a web
8. Have you become extremely dependent on some tech nologies? Some
search to see what others are doing to implement this idea. What
people no longer write down telephone numbers anywhere; instead, they
might be the downsides of using less paper?
simply program them into their cellphones. Some people feel helpless in
a foreign country unless they have a calculator in hand to compute 3. Computer pioneer John von Neumann was one of a group of
currency conversions. Many people rely on their email archive or individuals who conceived the idea of the
cellphone to hold essential infor mation, such as addresses and “stored program.” He could also divide two 8-digit num bers in his
appointments. When any of these technologies fails us, we can feel lost. head. Spend some time researching this remarkable man; at online
bookstores, look up some of the books he wrote and read the
Make a list of technologies that have become indispens able to your life.
reviews.
Imagine the consequences if any of these technologies should fail
you. What can you do to protect yourself against such failure? 4. Looking for legally free programs? Some places to start:
Write down what you think are the advantages and disadvantages of www.download.com/
social networking (for example, Face book). Keep this list, and revise it
after you have fin ished the course. What has changed on your list? Introduction to Information Technology
www.freewarefiles.com/
9. It has been said that the computer is a “meta medium” because it can
simulate (behave as) any other medium. Thus a computer can www.freedownloadscenter.com/
present text that can be read from virtual “pages” as if it were a 5. Visit the following websites to become aware of some topics of
book; it can let you compose interest in the computing world. Full compre hension of these
and print text as if it were a typewriter; it can play music like an topics isn’t necessary at this time; this is only to familiarize you
MP3 player; it can display video as if it were a with subject matter you may come in contact with.
television set; it can make telephone calls as if it were a telephone; it www.sciencedaily.com/news/computers_math/computer_ science/
www.computeruser.com/ http://slashdot.org/
www.infoworld.com/ www.slideshare.net/dheerajmehrotra/basic-concepts-of
information-technology-it-presentation/
47