Beginners User Guide

The Basics of Information Technology

This guide is one of a series of “How To” Guides” produced by Enterprise Ireland to meetthe needs of Irish companies, particularly our client base, the majority of whom are smallto medium enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing or internationally traded services.They are designed for non-IT professionals charged with developing and/or implementingeBusiness/IT strategy in their companies. Hopefully they may also be of use to IT professionals.These guides are only one of a range of eBusiness resources provided by EnterpriseIreland. Most of the other resources, can be accessed through our eBusiness webpages

www.openup.ie

Here you can access more guides and cases about eBusiness and related topics, detailsof solution providers, access to our free eBusiness e-zine and discussion forum, eBusinessevents guide and links to interesting reports etc.The funding for these guides was provided to Enterprise Ireland by “The InformationSociety Fund” which was established by Government to progress the objectives of theGovernment’s Action Plan for the Information Society.

Beginners How To Guide – The Basics of Information Technology

This Guide has been written for absolute beginners, to define Information Technology and related terms and to puta context on the use and importance of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in business.Information Technology involves the processing of information by a computer. Usually this means the use ofhardware, software, services, and the supporting infrastructure to manage and deliver information.IT has changed our daily personal lives radically over recent years - the use of mobile phones to make calls andsend text messages, the use of websites to book cheap flights and the use of ATM machines for banking are all anintegral part our society today.Clearly the business environment has been hugely impacted by these developments and practically every companyhas had to adapt IT in some form in order to compete effectively.eBusiness can be defined as the application of IT to business processes; i.e. the process of doing business withtrading partners electronically. This includes, for example, processing business transactions electronically, integratingbusiness processes electronically and transferring payments electronically and delivering services electronically.

Hardware

Hardware can be defined as IT-related machinery and equipment - if you can fall over it, its hardware! This wouldinclude physical machines such as personal computers (PC's), storage devices (such as CD's) and cables etc. Inorder to operate however, a computer uses software - hardware and software are interdependent. Hardware is thephysical unit which stores and transmits information, software is the logic and language that dictates how this isdone (see Software below). Until the late 1970's, most word processors were dedicated machines e.g. typewriters. Now computers have replaced almost all dedicated word processors. However in order to be able to work withtext, a PC, which is hardware, requires a set of instructions, which is software that provides word processingfunctions on the PC.. Popular word processing software packages are Microsoft Word and WordPerfect.The amount of work that a computer can do is dependent on the size of its memory and the speed that it canoperate at.When you see an advertisement for computers, RAM is often mentioned. This means Random Access Memory anddefines the computers capacity for work. Memory is like an electronic checkerboard, with each square holdingone byte of data or instruction. When personal computers first came on the market in the late 1970s, 64 kilobytes(64 KB) of RAM was the upper limit. Today, 64 megabytes (64 MB) of RAM is entry level (the starting point) for adesktop computer i.e. a thousand times as much.The speed at which a computer operates is dictated by the Processor in the Central Processing Unit (CPU), whichis the processing part of the computer. The CPU, clock and main memory make up a the basic computer. Acomplete computer system needs other elements such as the control units, input devices (e.g. keyboard), outputdevices (e.g. screen), storage devices and an operating system (the master control program that runs thecomputer). Any hardware device connected to a computer, such as a monitor, keyboard, printer, disk, tape,graphics tablet, scanner, joy stick, mouse etc is know as a peripheral device.The Operating System (O/S) is the first program (set of instructions) to come to life when the computer is switchedon. Its main part, the "kernel," is kept in the memory at all times. The operating system is the link between thehardware and the application programs that run in the computer. The applications "talk to" the operating system forall user activity and file management operations.Operating Systems that you have probably heard of include the various versions of Windows (95, 98, NT, XPetc), the Unix versions (Solaris, Linux, etc.), the Macintosh OS, the AS/400's and of course there are manymore. Anyone remember DOS - with its tiny text on a dark screen? DOS is still used as an Operating System forsome applications. There are other special-purpose operating systems.Storage devices are the temporary or permanent holding place for digital information. It refers to disks andtapes, for example where information is stored - think of it as having extra physical space in a warehouse.Memory is not a storage device - it is a temporary workspace that the computer uses to execute tasks, such asprocessing information.