IT Software & Website Developement

2012-06-11T11:19:00.001+05:30

In this section, we introduce the marketing concept, and then consider its relationship to more
recent concepts such as Internet marketing, e-commerce and e-business.
The word marketing has two distinct meanings in modern management practice. It
describes

1 The range of specialist marketing functions carried out within many organisations. Such
functions include market research, brand/product management, public relations and
customer service.

2 An approach or concept that can be used as the guiding philosophy for all functions and
activities of an organisation. Such a philosophy encompasses all aspects of a business.
Business strategy is guided by an organisation’s market and competitor focus and everyone
in an organisation should be required to have a customer focus in their job.

The modern marketing concept (Houston, 1986) unites these two meanings and stresses that
marketing encompasses the range of organisational functions and processes that seek to
determine the needs of target markets and deliver products and services to customers and other
key stakeholders such as employees and financial institutions. Increasingly the importance of
marketing is being recognised both as a vital function and as a guiding management
philosophy within organisations. Marketing has to be seen as the essential focus of all activities
within an organisation (Valentin, 1996). The marketing concept should lie at the heart of the
organisation, and the actions of directors, managers and employees should be guided by its
philosophy.

Modern marketing requires organisations to be committed to a market/customer orientation
(Jaworski and Kohli, 1993). All parts of the organisation should co-ordinate activities to ensure
that customer needs are met efficiently, effectively and profitably. Marketing encompasses
activities traditionally seen as the sole domain of accountants, production, human resources
management (HRM) and information technology (IT). Many of these functions had little
regard for customer considerations. Increasingly such functions are being reorientated,
evidenced by the importance of initiatives such as Total Quality Management (TQM),
Business Process Reengineering, Just in Time (JIT) and supply chain management.
Individuals’ functional roles are undergoing change, from being solely functional to having a
greater emphasis on process. Individuals are therefore being encouraged to become part-time
marketers. Processes have a significant impact on an organisation’s ability to service its
customers’ needs.

The Internet can be applied by companies as an integral part of the modern marketing
concept since:

* It can be used to support the full range of organisational functions and processes that deliver
products and services to customers and other key stakeholders.
* It is a powerful communications medium that can act as a ‘corporate glue’ that integrates
the different functional parts of the organisation.
* It facilitates information management, which is now increasingly recognised as a critical
marketing support tool to strategy formulation and implementation.
* The future role of the Internet should form part of the vision of a company since its future
impact will be significant to most businesses.
Useful PDF for Internet Marketing
Without adequate information, organisations are at a disadvantage with respect to
competitors and the external environment. Up-to-date, timely and accessible information about
the industry, markets, new technology, competitors and customers is a critical factor in an
organisation’s ability to plan and compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

How to Search on Search Engine..?

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Before doing a search, it's important to define your topic as completely and succinctly as possible. Write down exactly what information you're looking for, why you're looking for it, and what you're not looking for. This will help you to discover the best keywords for your search.

Keywords

With the exception of search engines such as AskJeeves.com, which will take questions in the form of actual queries, most work best if you provide them with several keywords. So how do you determine which keywords will work best?

Most users submit 1.5 keywords per search, which is not enough for an effective query - the recommended maximum is 6 to 8 carefully chosen words, preferably nouns and objects. (Search engines consider articles and pronouns clutter.) Avoid verbs, and use modifiers only when they help to define your object more precisely - as in "feta cheese" rather than just "cheese."

Now you have your keywords. How do you enter them into the search engine?

Use of Phrases

Your most powerful keyword combination is the phrase. Phrases are combinations of two or more words that must be found in the documents you're searching for in the EXACT order shown. You enter a phrase - such as "feta cheese" - into a search engine, within quotation marks.

Some searches provide specific options for phrases, while others don't allow them at all; but most will allow you to enter a phrase in quotation marks. Check the "Help" files of the search engine you're using to be sure what it accepts.

Punctuation and Capitalization

Most search engines are insensitive to case: you can type your queries in uppercase, lowercase, or a mix of cases. If you use lowercase, most engines will match on both upper and lower case; so for general searches, lowercase is the safest form to use.

Not all search engines handle punctuation the same way. When in doubt, consult the "Help" file.

Boolean Basics

"Boolean" searching (named after George Boole, the 19th-century mathematician who founded the field of symbolic logic) is a powerful technique that can narrow your search to a reasonable number of results, and increase the chance of those results being useful. Boolean searches are simple to learn and tremendously effective. The three most commonly used Boolean commands (or "operators") are AND, OR and AND NOT.

AND means "I want only documents that contain both/all words." For instance, the search "London" AND "Big Ben" AND "Buckingham Palace" AND "Trafalgar Square" would return only documents that contained all four keywords or phrases. AND is the most frequently used Boolean command.

OR means "I want documents that contain either word; I don't care which." The query "London" OR "Big Ben" OR "Buckingham Palace" OR "Trafalgar Square" would return all documents that contained even one of these four keywords or phrases. Use OR to string together synonyms; be careful about mixing it with AND.

AND NOT means "I want documents that contain this word, but not if the document also contains another word." The query "London" AND "Big Ben" AND NOT "Buckingham Palace" would return documents that include London and Big Ben, but not those that also include Buckingham Palace. Remember that AND NOT only applies to the word or phrase that immediately follows it.

Most search engines support the AND NOT command. It is sometimes called BUT NOT or NOT, and is sometimes indicated by placing a minus sign (-) before the term or phrase to be removed. (Check the search tips of the engine you're using to see which form of AND NOT it accepts). Before you apply AND NOT, see what results you get from a simpler search. AND NOT is a great way to weed out results you don't want, such as pornography.

Quick Tips

Use nouns as query keywords. Never use articles ("a," "the"), pronouns ("he," "it"), conjunctions ("and," "or") or prepositions ("to," "from") in your queries
Use 6 to 8 keywords per query
Where possible, combine keywords into phrases by using quotation marks, as in "solar system"
Spell carefully, and consider alternate spellings
Avoid redundant terms
Check the "Help" function of the particular search engine you're using, since they all have their own quirks and preferences

what is search engine?

2012-03-22T20:28:00.001+05:30

A search engine is a sort of a page that shows the list of all the web sites along with the information on it. This service had been every popularly used among people and at time the search engine is also not able to provide people with effective results. It had been found out that the search engine is of greater benefit to the people and majority of the people had been utilizing it as a source of getting quality information.

For the search engine activity it is highly recommended that the person had to enter the keywords in the search box which as a results provides the person with a list of all the documents and pages which are relevant to the keyword that had been searched.

It must be made sure that the entire data on the search engine can be accessed by the people when they enter a particular keyword for certain results. When the results are easily accessed on the search engine, the serach engine with positive views and points is ranked on the top most positions. Google, LycosAsk, yahoo, Jeeves, Look Smart, Alta Vista, are the most widely used search engines where people can get a larger range of information. The entire information gathers from all the search engines is quite helpful and hence many benefits can also be generated through it. Through search engine people can get their products marketed easily and at time on the search engine, people make money too. The money is earned each time the person clicks the specific website. Mostly through search engines, the internet marketing activity is being carried out. The main aim for the creation of the search engines is the customer need.

Mainly the search engine companies are always aware of their customer needs so they try to place certain important information on the beginning information but at time the most important information from the company view point is not at all effective and useful for the people.

History

During the early development of the web, there was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains.^[1] As more webservers went online the central list could not keep up. On the NCSA site new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"^[2]

The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie.^[3] The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index toComputerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal GopherHierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed yet for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that would periodically mirror these pages and rewrite them into a standard format which formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993.^[4]

In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index called 'Wandex'. The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.

JumpStation (released in December 1993^[5]) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of the limited resources available on the platform on which it ran, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered.

One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public. Also in 1994, Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University) was launched and became a major commercial endeavor.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, andAltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal to be the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser. There was so much interest that instead a deal was struck with Netscape by five of the major search engines, where for $5 million per year each search engine would be in rotation on the Netscape search engine page. The five engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite.^[6]^[7]

Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s.^[8] Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.

Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence.^{[citation needed]} The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal.

By 2000, Yahoo! was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which ownedAlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions.

Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings fromLooksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In 2004, Microsoftbegan a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).

Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing, was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in whichYahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology.

Web Browser History

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Dozens of innovative web browsers have been created by various people and teams over the years.

The first widely used web browser was NCSA Mosaic. The Mosaic programming team then created the first commercial web browser called Netscape Navigator, later renamed Communicator, then renamed back to just Netscape. The Netscape browser led in user share until Microsoft Internet Explorer took the lead in 1999 due to its distribution advantage. A free open source software version of Netscape was then developed called Mozilla, which was the internal name for the old Netscape browser, and released in 2002. Mozilla has since gained in market share, particularly on non-Windows platforms, largely due to its open source foundation, and in 2004 was released in the quickly popular FireFox version.

A chronological listing of some of the influential early web browsers that advanced the state of the art is provided below:

WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.

libwww. Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch.

Line-mode. Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.

Erwise. After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master's project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn't developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.

ViolaWWW. Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.

Midas. During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLACdeveloped a third browser for Unix systems, called Midas, to help distribute information to colleagues about his physics research.

Samba. Robert Cailliau started development of the first web browser for the Macintosh, called Samba. Development was picked up by Nicola Pellow, and the browser was functional by the end of 1992.

Mosaic. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.

Arena. In 1993, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England, developed a browser called Arena, with powerful features for positioning tables and graphics.

Lynx. The University of Kansas had written a hypertext browser independently of the web, called Lynx, used to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0 in March, 1993. Lynx quickly became the preferred web browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in use today. Resources include the Browser.org Lynx page, the ISC Lynx page, and the Lynx User Guide .

Cello . Tom Bruce, cofounder of the Legal Information Institute , realized that most lawyers used Microsoft PC's, and so he developed a web browser for that platform called Cello, finished in the summer of 1993.

Opera. In 1994, the Opera browser was developed by a team of researchers at a telecommunication company called Telenor in Oslo, Norway. The following year, two members of the team -- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy -- left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially. Opera 2.1 was first made available on the Internet in the summer of 1996.

Internet in a box. In January, 1994, O'Reilly and Associates announced a product called Internet In A Box which collected all of the software needed to access the web together, so that you only had to install one application, instead of downloading and installing several programs. While not a unique browser in its own right, this product was a breakthrough because it distributed other browsers and made the web a lot more accessible to the home user.

Navipress. In February, 1994, Navisoft released a browser for the PC and Macintosh called Navipress. This was the first browser since Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser that incorporated an editor, so that you could browse and edit content at the same time. Navipress later became AOLPress , and is still available in some download locations on the Internet but has not been maintained since 1997.

Mozilla. In October, 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the Internet. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, making it the first commercial web browser. An open source version of the Netscape browser was released in 2002 was also named Mozilla in tribute to this early version, and then released as the quickly popular FireFox in November, 2004.
Internet Explorer. On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system, including a Web browser called Internet Explorer. By the fall of 1996, Explorer had a third of market share, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999.

What is a browser?

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Web browser, a software application used to locate, retrieve and also display content on the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images, video and other files. As a client/server model, the browser is the client run on a computer that contacts the Web server and requests information. The Web server sends the information back to the Web browser which displays the results on the computer or other Internet-enabled device that supports a browser.

Today's browsers are fully-functional software suites that can interpret and display HTML Web pages, applications, JavaScript, AJAX and other content hosted on Web servers. Many browsers offer plug-ins which extend the capabilities of a browser so it can display multimedia information (including sound and video), or the browser can be used to perform tasks such as videoconferencing, to design web pages or add anti-phishing filters and other security features to the browser.

Some Basic Parts of Web Browser

We all know what a Web browser looks like, but it's good to have a complete breakdown of the various parts of most Web browsers just for reference's sake. The parts of a browser include:

Status bar: This is the box at the bottom of your browser window. The status bar displays all sorts of information, depending on what you're doing at the time, but mostly it's for showing load speed and the URL of whatever address your mouse is hovering over.
Address bar:This is the box at the top of your browser window that displays the entire URL, or Web site address.
Title bar: The title bar is at the very top of your browser window; in both Firefox and Internet Explorer it is the blue bar there at the top. You'll see the title of the Web page there; for example, you should see "What Is A Web Browser?" at the top of your browser window right now.
Toolbar Icons: The toolbar and its icons are at the top of your browser window right underneath the Title Bar. This is where you'll see the Back button, the Home button, the Refresh button, etc.
Display Window: The Display Window is just a fancy term for your browser work space; it's the frame through which you see this website right now.
Scroll Bars: If you've ever been to a website that you had to "scroll down" to read something, then you've used the scroll bars. They're just navigational/directional aids.

There's more if you REALLY want to get into the nuts and bolts of a Web browser, but these parts are the basic ones that anyone should be concerned about. And of course, not all browsers are created equal - so some of the above definitions might not be appropriate.

The Most Popular Web Browsers

Here are just a few of Web browsers available to you for a free download:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer : Most Internet users are using Internet Explorer because it's easy to use and most Web sites are written with Internet Explorer in mind, meaning that they are compatible.
Opera : Opera is another popular browser that's easy to use; however, it can have some compatibility issues with various websites.
Mozilla's Firefox : Firefox is rapidly gaining ground right behind Internet Explorer because of its tabbed browsing, superior security features, and fast load.
Mac Safari : Specifically for Mac users, Safari is an excellent choice for a Web browser, with fast load and good compatibility with most websites out there.

Relationship between Global Economy and Information Technology

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Information Technology Changing the Global Economy

Today, part of the global economy grows as the information technology, changing the economy landscape. Professor Uday Karmarkar from UCLA Anderson School of Management describes the rise of service industrialization below.

This is happening because of the advent of information technologies and the surge of new technologies made it possible. This is also termed as globalization of the economy, or even techno-globalism. The phenomenon is evident in most industry, especially the financial market. As a result, this increased the cooperation between and inter-linkages among organization to lead innovative work for the research & development, servicing and production spreading around the globe

Introduction of Information Technology

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The advent of computer-based information technologies, especially on the emphasis upon process, system and code has enabled business models and processes to perceive that they, too, function as forms or subsets of Information Technology (IT). Today, everyone has begun to write computer programs to aid their business processes, even small medium businesses. This is also part of reengineering the business process, for example from a brick and mortar operation to a click and mortar.

IT is the area of managing technology and spans a wide variety of areas that include computer software,information systems ,computer hardware, programming languages but are not limited to things such as processes, and data constructs. In short, anything that renders data, information or perceived knowledge in any visual format whatsoever, via any multimedia distribution mechanism, is considered part of the IT domain. IT provides businesses with four sets of core services to help execute the business strategy: business process automation, providing information, connecting with customers, and productivity tools.
IT professionals perform a variety of functions (IT Disciplines/Competencies) that ranges from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as management and administration of entire systems. Information technology is starting to spread further than the conventional personal computer and network technologies, and more into integrations of other technologies such as the use of cell phones, televisions, automobiles, and more, which is increasing the demand for such jobs.
In the recent past, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study as compared to Computer Science and Information Systems today. SIGITE (Special Interest Group for IT Education) is the ACM working group for defining these standards. The Worldwide IT services revenue totaled $763 billion in 2009.

TO Know More About History of IT Refer this Book

http://www.educationdev.net/educationdev/Docs/mal_1.PDF

History of Software

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It shouldn't be a big surprise that the creation or software also went in large but distinguishable steps. Compared with hardware there were fewer developments that went parallel or overlapping. In rare cases developments were reinvented sometimes because the development or invention was not published, even prohibited to be made public (war, secrecy acts etc.) or became known at the same time and after (legal)discussions the "other" party won the honors.

Birth of “Software” and the Interactive Minicomputer

According to Jeffery R. Yost, the term “software” was created in the late 1950s and was soon adopted throughout the industry (2011). Coined by statistician John Tukey, the term became a catchall, user-friendly term for the work of computer programmers who were using terminology ranging from “computer program” to “code.” The America Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy describes software as “[t]he programs and instructions that run a computer, as opposed to the actual physical machinery and devices that compose the hardware.” Meanwhile, The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing adds that software is divided into two primary types: system software and program applications. System software includes general program execution processes such as compilers and, most recognizably, the disk operating system (DOS), which has evolved in form in IBM PC-style computers within the last two decades from the ubiquitous Microsoft DOS prompt (MS-DOS) to stylish Windows-based platforms from Microsoft 2000 to Windows Vista. Similarly, Apple has seen countless new releases from the Apple DOS 3.1 of 1977 to the OS X series of recent years. Program applications include everything else, from gaming to multimedia to scientific applications. Finally, software combines lines of source code written by humans with the work of compilers and assemblers in executing machine code.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, a project called TX-O was given to Ken Olsen. The project hoped to develop smaller research computers out of tiny, powerful transistor technology. MIT programmer Wesley Clark designed the TX-O and with Olsen’s methodical and persistent management helped develop the foundation of Olsen’s dream: “a reliable computer…accessible by one person, inexpensive and low powered, but…compact, fast, and exciting” . After MIT, Olsen and his assistant Harlan Anderson obtained venture capital to found the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to develop interactive minicomputers to sell on the open market. Computer models such as DEC’s Programmed Data Processor series used a concept called “open architecture” to allow personalized software to run everything from submarines to refineries to neon displays at Times Square. DEC used the millions of dollars gained by going public in 1966 to enter into the field of networking by developing “standardized technologies and communication protocols.” IBM machines didn’t have the networking capacity other companies had begun to develop, resulting in the loss of most of its market share. It re-entered the playing field in 1976 by developing minicomputers of its own, entering into a field that so many had not believed in: the personal computer.

Advanced Hardware for Complex Applications

As early as 1939, scientists such as William Shockley theorized that diminutive semiconductors would replace vacuum tubes. Indeed, all of modern electronics is based on Shockley’s ideas. Semiconductors can handle electronic pulses at the rate of billions of times per second, instead of the 10,000-times-persecond speed of the clunky and precarious vacuum tubes. Fairchild Semiconductor entered the market to compete with Shockley Semiconductor, and soon Fairchild became known for an innovation in semiconductors that is now familiar around the world: the use of silicon.

Silicon, “a commonplace mineral that constitutes 90 percent of the earth’s surface” was first used by Fairchild for U.S. Air Force rockets in transistors that needed to withstand intense heat. Additional elements were combined with silicon on flattened transistors to create the first integrated circuits capable of handling multiple devices and increasingly complex software applications. “Silicon Valley” was born as innumerable high-tech companies emerged on the scene, congregating in at the southern end of California's San Francisco Bay area. Perhaps most notably, Integrated Electronics, or Intel, was founded and new advances in memory chips and microprocessors allowed computers to handle software light years more complex than the single mathematical computations of the original mainframes

The Innovators of the Digital Age

Microsoft's MS-DOS was directly modeled on a now lesser-known operating system called CP/M that was developed by University of Washington graduate Gary Kildall’s Digital Research (DRI). Kildall’s work was essential to Bill Gates and Microsoft (which was originally founded to sell the Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming language interpreter for hobbyists to write their own programs), but so were the early personal computer developments of Apple and its subsequent graphical user interface (GUI) that preceded Windows. It is Kildall’s work, nevertheless, that truly shaped Microsoft and much about modern computing. Evans theorizes that had Kildall had his way, the personal computer industry would have had access to multitasking windows-style platforms much sooner and the entire industry would be much more advanced today. Still, Kildall is attributed with the ideas that were “the genesis of the whole third-party software industry”.

Gary Kildall’s style of programming helped drive the transition from mechanical computing into digital computing. Kildall developed open language programming years before IBM’s PC, and a number of months before Apple. In short, before microcomputers even existed, Kildall authored a programming language “for a microcomputer operating system and the first floppy disk operating system” . Intel’s microprocessors were already running everything from microwaves to watches, but Kildall imagined them in home computers running software that would drive networks and wouldn’t be bogged down by hardware compatibility issues. His Programming Language for Microcomputers (PL/M) evolved into the Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M), which contained the first PC prompt, wherein Kildall could open and store files in directories--work that is now down seemingly automatically as users click-and-drag files through virtual space on the computer desktop.

Next, Kildall’s basic input/output system (BIOS) could be easily changed by programmers to adapt to their specific hardware. Kildall’s software advancements were easily adapted into clone systems, though Kildall had largely retained licensing rights to his software through encoded copyright and encryption techniques. One operating system, however, Tim Patterson’s DOS, or the Quick ’n’ Dirty Operating System (QDOS), was developed for Rod Brock’s Seattle Computer Products. QDOS, according to Evans, “was yet another one of the rip-offs of the CP/M design” that would not have necessarily mattered had IBM’s business arrangements not aligned with those of Bill Gates. Spurred by the success of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s Apple products from the late 1970s and 1980s, IBM entered the field of microcomputers. Bill Gates seized the opportunity of Kildall’s delayed CP/M-86 (being designed for the faster Intel chip IBM had decided upon) and purchased Patterson’s operating system in order to strike a deal .

The trouble was, Kildall had already made arrangements with IBM and he thought he had successfully negotiated CP/M a share of the market upon the release of IBM’s new personal computer in 1981. But the final price point of CP/M was six times that of Microsoft’s PC-DOS, effectively flushing CP/M out of the market. Kildall had been betrayed. Ironically, only Kildall knew the limitations of CP/M and PC-DOS. His intentions for multitasking operating software would have revolutionized the industry at that time, but the IBM-Microsoft partnership dominated the American market and they evolved at their own pace. Meanwhile, Kildall kept his operation afloat with his European offices, which embraced the multitasking capacities of his MP/M OS.

While Kildall went on to innovate in areas from CD-ROMs to computer networking, DRI combined the graphic display technology of Atari with the expertise of former Microsoft programmer Kay Nishi and cloned the single-tasking MS-DOS with their DR-DOS. Upon entering the market, DR-DOS not only drove down Microsoft’s price point, but also fixed a number of MS-DOS bugs. This move helped lead to Novell’s acquisition of DRI in 1991 for $120 million. Gates missed the opportunity to acquire DRI for $10 million a few years earlier but, oddly enough, his investment in the ideas of Steve Jobs in 1996 helped Apple enter successful new fields of digital innovation such as the iPod and music downloading software, a field that, of course, Microsoft soon entered. Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft proved the power of owning the operating system. After years of working with IBM as the provider of the software for their hardware, Microsoft surpassed IBM

The History of the Internet

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Many people think that the Internet is a recent innovation, when in fact the essence of it has been around for over a quarter century. The Internet began as ARPAnet, a U.S. Department of Defense project to create a nationwide computer network that would continue to function even if a large portion of it were destroyed in a nuclear war or natural disaster.

During the next two decades, the network that evolved was used primarily by academic institutions, scientists and the government for research and communications. The appeal of the Internet to these bodies was obvious, as it allowed disparate institutions to connect to each others' computing systems and databases, as well as share data via E-mail.

The nature of the Internet changed abruptly in 1992, when the U.S. government began pulling out of network management, and commercial entities offered Internet access to the general public for the first time. This change in focus marked the beginning of the Internet's astonishing expansion.
According to a survey conducted by CommerceNet and Nielsen Media Research in early 1997, nearly one out of every four Americans over the age of 16 is an Internet user. And the number of users worldwide is believed to be well into the tens of millions. Other statistics are equally startling:

A CNN report stated that Internet traffic in 1996 was 25 times what it was just two years earlier.
The market research group IntelliQuest pegged the number of Internet users in the U.S. in late 1996 at 47 million - a 34 percent increase over the first quarter of that year.
According to IBM, 146 countries currently have at least some level of Internet access.
The technology research firm IDG estimates that by century's end, one billion people worldwide will have access to personal computers—more than doubling the computer-savvy population of 1996.

The Internet explosion coincides with the advent of increasingly powerful yet reasonably priced personal computers with easy-to-use graphical operating systems. The result has been an attraction of recent computer "converts" to the network, and new possibilities for exploiting a wealth of multimedia capabilities.

For further details on the Internet's history, go to http://www.internetvalley.com/intval.html

How Does the Internet Work?

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How does the Internet work? Good question! The Internet's growth has become explosive and it seems impossible to escape the bombardment of www.com's seen constantly on television, heard on radio, and seen in magazines. Because the Internet has become such a large part of our lives, a good understanding is needed to use this new tool most effectively.

Because the Internet is a global network of computers each computer connected to the Internet must have a unique address. Internet addresses are in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn where nnn must be a number from 0 - 255. This address is known as an IP address. (IP stands for Internet Protocol; more on this later.) The picture below illustrates two computers connected to the Internet; your computer with IP address 1.2.3.4 and another computer with IP address 5.6.7.8. The Internet is represented as an abstract object in-between.

The Internet is a worldwide collection of computer networks, cooperating with each other to exchange data using a common software standard. Through telephone wires and satellite links, Internet users can share information in a variety of forms. The size, scope and design of the Internet allows users to:

connect easily through ordinary personal computers and local phone numbers;
exchange electronic mail (E-mail) with friends and colleagues with accounts on the Internet;
post information for others to access, and update it frequently;
access multimedia information that includes sound, photographic images and even video; and
access diverse perspectives from around the world.

An additional attribute of the Internet is that it lacks a central authority—in other words, there is no "Internet, Inc." that controls the Internet. Beyond the various governing boards that work to establish policies and standards, the Internet is bound by few rules and answers to no single organization.

What is Internet..?

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When the computing era took a major leap in the 80s, it was all just about the operating systems and the programming languages. People were getting gaga over the heavy technology revolution thinking that this is the one thing that the world needed to get over the bounds of time and space, and as usual, they were wrong. It was not long after the computer revolution that a tide, a blizzard of communication, arrived. This technology now makes the computers look lifeless if they don’t have it. Connecting the corners of the cobwebbed world even from its remotest corner is the 'Internet'

Internet

The internet in simple terms is a network of the interlinked computer networking worldwide, which is accessible to the general public. These interconnected computers work by transmitting data through a special type of packet switching which is known as the IP or the internet protocol.

Internet is such a huge network of several different interlinked networks relating to the business, government, academic, and even smaller domestic networks, therefore internet is known as the network of all the other networks. These networks enable the internet to be used for various important functions which include the several means of communications like the file transfer, the online chat and even the sharing of the documents and web sites on the WWW, or the World Wide Web.

It is always mistaken said that the internet and the World Wide Web are both the same terms, or are synonymous. Actually there is a very significant difference between the two which has to be clear to understand both the terms. The internet and World Wide Web are both the networks yet; the internet is the network of the several different computers which are connected through the linkage of the accessories like the copper wires, the fiber optics and even the latest wireless connections. However, the World Wide Web consists of the interlinked collection of the information and documents which are taken as the resource by the general public. These are then linked by the website URLs and the hyperlinks. Therefore World Wide Web is one of the services offered by the whole complicated and huge network of the internet.

The use of IP in the Internet is the integral part of the network, as they provide the services of the internet, through different layers organization through the IP data packets. There are other protocols that are the sub-classes of the IP itself, like the TCP, and the HTTP.

Types Of Computer Software

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In the present day world, computers play a significant part in our daily life. To provide us different services, different types of software are run on these computers. Computer software is generally of three types: System software, Application software and Off-the-shelf Software. A brief outline of each type of software is given below.

System software

This is the software which is actually running your computer. This software handles different request for use the hardware, many housekeeping work, storage of data etc. A good example of such system software is the Windows program which is running your computer. Linux and UNIX are the other common system software available for running computers.

Application software

These types of software are developed to handle a specific task and are developed to cater for the specific requirement of the user. This could be the Payroll system or the Accounting system of your company. The system is developed keeping all the requirements of the user in mind. But, for small companies it would not be a good idea to develop software applications specifically for your use. To keep the system running properly, you should have skilled IT expertise available to you and you might have to spend lots time and money to run the system properly.

Off-the-shelf software

When software is developed catering for your specific requirement, you would be able to execute all the functions you desire. But, development of software would be quite costly and may not be suitable for small enterprises for their implementation. Off-the-shelf software generally provides some standard functions and they do not cost much. But, you may find that the software does not provide what you require. Therefore, you might have to change your business practice to be in line with this shrink-wrapped software.

Programming Software

This is one of the most commonly known and popularly used types of computer software. These software come in the form of tools that assist a programmer in writing computer programs. Computer programs are sets of logical instructions that make a computer system perform certain tasks. The tools that help programmers in instructing a computer system include text editors, compilers and interpreters. Compilers translate source code written in a programming language into the language which a computer understands (mostly the binary form). Compilers generate objects which are combined and converted into executable programs through linkers. Debuggers are used to check code for bugs and debug it. The source code is partially or completely simulated for the debugging tool to run on it and remove bugs if any. Interpreters execute programs. They execute the source code or a precompiled code or translate source code into an intermediate language before execution.

Inventory Management Software

This type of software helps an organization in tracking its goods and materials on the basis of quality as well as quantity. Warehouse inventory management functions encompass the internal warehouse movements and storage. Inventory software helps a company in organizing inventory and optimizing the flow of goods in the organization, thus leading to improved customer service.

Utility Software

Also known as service routine, utility software helps in the management of computer hardware and application software. It performs a small range of tasks. Disk defragmenters, systems utilities and virus scanners are some of the typical examples of utility software.

Data Backup and Recovery Software

An ideal data backup and recovery software provides functionalities beyond simple copying of data files. This software often supports user needs of specifying what is to be backed up and when. Backup and recovery software preserve the original organization of files and allow an easy retrieval of the backed up data.

Malware

Malware refers to any malicious software and is a broader category of software that are a threat to computer security. Adware, spyware, computer viruses, worms, trojan horses and scareware are malware. Computer viruses are malicious programs which replicate themselves and spread from one computer to another over the network or the Internet. Computer worms do the same, the only difference being that viruses need a host program to attach with and spread, while worms don't need to attach themselves to programs. Trojans replicate themselves and steal information. Spyware can monitor user activity on a computer and steal user information without their knowledge.

Adware

Adware is software with the means of which advertisements are played and downloaded to a computer. Programmers design adware as their tool to generate revenue. They do extract user information like the websites he visits frequently and the pages he likes. Advertisements that appear as pop-ups on your screen are the result of adware programs tracking you. But adware is not harmful to computer security or user privacy. The data it collects is only for the purpose of inviting user clicks on advertisements.

Computer Software Definition

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Computer Software Definition

Software is a generic term for organized collections of computer data and instructions, often broken into two major categories: system software that provides the basic non-task-specific functions of the computer, and application software which is used by users to accomplish specific tasks.

System software is responsible for controlling, integrating, and managing the individual hardware components of a computer system so that other software and the users of the system see it as a functional unit without having to be concerned with the low-level details such as transferring data from memory to disk, or rendering text onto a display. Generally, system software consists of an operating system and some fundamental utilities such as disk formatters, file managers, display managers, text editors, user authentication (login) and management tools, and networking and device control software.

Application software, on the other hand, is used to accomplish specific tasks other than just running the computer system. Application software may consist of a single program, such as an image viewer; a small collection of programs (often called a software package) that work closely together to accomplish a task, such as a spreadsheet or text processing system; a larger collection (often called a software suite) of related but independent programs and packages that have a common user interface or shared data format, such as Microsoft Office, which consists of closely integrated word processor, spreadsheet, database, etc.; or a software system, such as a database management system, which is a collection of fundamental programs that may provide some service to a variety of other independent applications.

Software is created with programming languages and related utilities, which may come in several of the above forms: single programs like script interpreters, packages containing a compiler, linker, and other tools; and large suites (often called Integrated Development Environments) that include editors, debuggers, and other tools for multiple languages.