Information Technology Explained

Information technology entirely engrosses and informs the world around us today. At their most fundamental level, computers essentially exist to store, manipulate, and transfer information. From your personal computer system handling thousands of potential files and communications to your digital thermostat taking sensor information and turning this into information that the furnace can act upon.

How all of this works can be easily imagined, but at a very close level we blur the lines between materials engineering and information technology. Essentially harnessing the power of electricity, simple logic gates are created where current flow can be on or off. This is the famous 1 and 0 that you likely recognize tied to information technology and computers, which was popularized by The Matrix. These 1 and 0 signals can be used for logic: If the current is 0, the light is off, and when the current is 1, the light will turn on.

We can make these basic building blocks more complex, and combine them into larger blocks of logic that perform arithmetic operators from basic addition and subtraction all the way up to and including advanced functions and the sort of matrix math usually reserved for graphical computing applications.

Programmers speak to these logic blocks using a programming language such as C or C++ (Although more abstract languages such as Java, C++, C#, Javascript, Go, Python etc can also speak to the computer in a more indirect fashion). The programmer can tell the computer how to injest certain pieces of information, how and where to store it, what other information to combine or manipulate it with, and if the information needs to be sent out to other computers on a network.

An example of this scenario is your reception of the web page that you are looking at now! Your computer would have had to reach a server (computer), with a data payload requesting a response. The server parses this request information, and then decides (based on programming) how to fulfill it. In almost all cases, the computer will reach into a database for information, combine it with information from a webpage template, and then package this information up to send back to your computer as a completed web page. 

You can imagine the ramifications of doing this with infinite types of data and infinite types of data manipulation. Almost anything is made possible as long as you are able to inject or detect the source of information and have the programming capability to creatively store and manipulate the data before using it for your purpose. From large industrial machinery, to small medical devices, to watches, farming equipment, electrical grids, and of course our phones, computers, and large government supercomputers: Virtually every piece of technology in the modern age is a piece of information technology, only varying in how much data they take in, manipulate, store, process, and output.

This is an immensely interesting field with thousands upon thousands of subfields that can take a lifetime to understand by themselves. If you need IT services, make sure to hire professional IT in Wellington to ensure quality work. 

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Created on May 6th 2021 02:44. Viewed 255 times.

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