The volume of new knowledge in the last century is growing exponentially. In order not to drown in the flow of information, quickly find it and use it wisely, there is a whole area of activity - IT technology. What this means, you can guess by expanding the abbreviation IT - Information Technology. Everything related to information - search, storage, transmission - refers to IT-technologies.
In antiquity, IT technologies also existed. Knowledge was recorded on parchment, papyrus, paper. Data transmission was carried out by messengers, pigeon mail, in the 19th century, mankind mastered the radio and telegraph. Information was stored in libraries and archives.
But, of course, the boom in information technology occurred in the 20th century, when computer technology appeared. Computer systems have shown the greatest efficiency when working with information, therefore, speaking about IT, it is often computer technologies that are implied.
Data transfer
The exchange of information has reached a new level after the discovery of electricity. The ability to transmit data through electrical signals has become a major achievement of IT technology. What did this give ordinary people?
Our contemporaries can now communicate with each other from anywhere in the world. There was an opportunity to get an education without leaving home. The Internet has largely replaced traditional sources of knowledge. The digitization of paper books, annals, documents is in full swing. Digital copies of priceless works are available to all comers.
At the dawn of the Internet, the amount of information transmitted was very limited. For example, it took 15 minutes to download a music recording to your computer. Improvement of data transfer methods has allowed to increase the data exchange speed by hundreds of times. This opened up new possibilities - such as holding video conferences, webinars, watching online TV shows, and IP telephony.
Data storage
Data transfer and storage are closely interconnected. If it will not be possible to store large amounts of information, then powerful communication channels will also not be in demand. And great progress has been made in this area of information technology . The cost of a hard disk changes little, but the amount of information that can be written to it has increased tenfold over a decade.
For comparison, the hard drive's memory in 1995 was about 500 MB, in 2005 it was already 80 GB, and in 2015 the majority exceeded the limit of 1 terabyte. On the Internet, servers are used to store data. In fact, these are ordinary personal computers sharpened for data storage. For greater efficiency, they are combined into data centers - the brainchild of IT technology. What is this if not one of the symbols of a post-industrial society? In one room can be hundreds of servers. The amount of electricity consumed by them can reach the output of a small power plant.
Database
The storage and transfer of data, of course, is very important, but only if you quickly find and process the necessary information. There has also been great progress. To store information, databases have been developed that allow you to process and retrieve information in an optimal way. Computer databases have entered all spheres of human activity. They stand both in the ticket office and in the medical registry, with their help a lesson schedule is drawn up at the school.
There are free and commercial databases, both for a single user, and allowing many people to access them at the same time. Accordingly, programming languages have been created that allow you to create databases for different situations.
Data search
IT is also helping us not to get lost in the stormy ocean of information. What are these names - Google, Yandex, Rambler - probably know all Internet users. The huge amount of information accumulated on the World Wide Web makes finding the right information a non-trivial task.
It is impossible to check every document from beginning to end, otherwise each request would be processed for weeks. Therefore, the developers of search engines resort to various tricks. So, for example, each site has keywords that are searched first. In addition, the pages found must be sorted by importance, so that the user can extract the most useful information from the first sites found.
Also, the search system must cut off resources that artificially wind up a rating for themselves. Search engines are developed by large teams of programmers. Their founders become billionaires, and the cost of advertising on the main page of the search engine costs astronomical amounts - all because millions of users visit it daily.
Let me be taught
How can I get a profession in the field of IT technology? This is primarily universities. Professions related to computer technology, programming, information technology, are in great demand now. New departments have appeared at institutes and universities to provide the labor market with specialists in the field of IT technology. Education traditionally focuses on theory. On the one hand, this knowledge is quite abstract, and it is difficult to directly apply it in practice. On the other hand, the profession of an IT specialist involves lifelong learning, and the foundation laid in the university will help the graduate to quickly master the latest developments.
There is another way to become a professional in this field. Currently, a lot of literature on IT technology has been released. "For Dummies" - this is probably the name of the most popular series of books on the basics of programming, database design, web design, networking, and so on. Learning this kind of literature also has its advantages. Almost always, it is purely applied in nature, written in easy to understand language. Having taken the first steps, you can start earning your first money on the freelancers exchange, performing simple tasks for ridiculous money, but gaining invaluable experience. With due diligence, noticeable success can be achieved in 5 years.
Both approaches have the right to exist, the more so sometimes studying at a university becomes unavailable for financial reasons. The development of IT technology is so rapid that university education simply does not follow it. It provides a certain foundation, but many things will have to be studied again. Anyway, the specifics of an IT specialist is such that you will have to study constantly in order to remain in demand on the labor market.
Promising developments
Of the latest developments and areas of IT-technologies, cloud technologies can be noted. If before a user installed the necessary applications on his computer for work, now more and more services are appearing on the Internet. Graphic and text editors, video processing right in the browser no longer surprise anyone. Accounting and management programs are appearing, allowing you to keep abreast of events away from the workplace.
Active work is underway to recognize the human voice and image. If the computer learns to recognize the image, then this will be another breakthrough in IT technology. Photos from documents can be checked automatically. This will be of great help to law enforcement agencies and the border service. Confident recognition of human speech in the future will allow you to control the computer in the most familiar way to a person.
Thousands of articles, websites, books are devoted to IT-technology. What it is? It is impossible to fully convey in a single review. But if you are interested in the world of information technology, then the task of the article can be considered completed.