ict

• Information and communication technology (ICT) collectively refers to the technologies, both hardware and software, that enable humans to communicate with one another.
• From this time up to today, computers are evolving from the basic textual interfaces to graphical user interfaces or GUI.
• The beginning of ICT can be traced back when humans started to use objects to communicate with one another.
• The four main periods of ICT are Premechanical, Mechanical, Electromechanical, and Electronic.
• The Premechanical period can be traced back thousands of years ago, around 3,000 BCE to 1450 BCE, and started with humans writing symbols as substitutes for pictures to depict ideas, objects and animals.
• The Premechanical period saw the production of paper, leading to the storage of information being revolutionized as humans continued to write information that could be organized in some manner and kept as a permanent record.
• As books grew in number, they needed to be compiled and stored in areas, leading to the creation of libraries, which were considered the first data centers in history.
• The most popular device created in the Premechanical period is said to have come from China – the abacus, a manually operated device similar to the modern calculator, which was considered the first device to process information.
• The Mechanical period, which bridged the Premechanical period and the current period, started around 1450-1840 and focused on automating and speeding up numerical calculations.
• The highlight of the Mechanical period was the advent of the mechanical calculator called the Pascaline, invented by Blaise Pascal and Wilhelm Schickard.
• The invention of Pascaline inspired other inventors to automate counting, including Charles Babbage, who invented the Analytical Engine, considered the first programmable mechanical computer.
• The Electromechanical period ushered in a new age in communications and information, starting around 1840-1940, and saw the use of electricity for information handling and transfer bloom.
• The Electromechanical period saw the use of telegraph to transmit information over long distances, coded in sounds of dots and spaces, and dashes over wired (and eventually wireless) media.
• The highlight of this period is focused on the advent of solid state devices or electronic devices.
• In 1844, an American inventor named Samuel Morse successfully introduced the first single-circuit telegraph, which gave rise to the Morse Code.
• On the other hand, the opposing was also using machines to automatically decode intercepted information.
• The telegraph is considered the first electrical communications device.
• These machines were mechanical in nature but were run by electricity.
• This period also saw the creation of high-level, general purpose programming languages (e.g., FORTRAN in 1954, COBOL), which ushered the modern programming languages we today.
• The transistor is the foundation of every electronic device today.
• The integrated circuit is a device that is composed of a group of transistors and circuit elements compressed in a single package.
• The IC revolutionized the use of computers and electronic devices because circuits are integrated in a chip or a single package, limiting the distances between components, resulting in a faster operating speed.
• Personal computers then used these processors to deliver user applications.
• The electronic period started in the 1940s and continues to the present.
• These machines were intended to encode and transmit information over telegraph lines.
• The first working model used sets of letters and numbers by using electric current.
• The late vacuum tubes period in the electronic period includes the start of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first electronic and general purpose computer, marked a revolutionary period in computing.
• The transistor is an electronic device with properties and functions similar to vacuum tubes, but it is lightweight and faster.
• An American electrical engineer named Jack Kilby was credited for introducing the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958.
• In 1947, the transistor was invented.
• They were used in the Second World War to avoid information being intercepted by the enemy.
• The first commercial telegraph was invented in 1837 by William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone.
• The telephone converts sound energy into electricity and enables the telephone network to transmit it over copper wires.
• The advent and development of integrated circuits ushered in the period of powerful processors.
• ENIAC was a big machine that occupied an area of 167 square meters.
• These devices were slow and bulky because of their internal mechanical components.
• At this time, computing devices also started to revolutionize information handling and processing.
• The first full transistor computer was developed in 1950 and was faster than vacuum computers.