The History of Information Technology

The History of Information Technology

The capabilities and design of computers developed rapidly through the forties and fifties, with the first office application appearing in 1951. In the early days of computing, most computer operations were reduced to calculations. The programs that drove them had to communicate directly with elements of the computer.

For example, to add one number to another, the programmer would have to write an instruction to fetch one number from an area of storage into a register and then fetch the second number from another named area of storage and add it in the same register.

Information technology, as we know it today, could never have happened without the development of natural language programming. Early programming language involved a series of codes, which were numbers. Early computer programmers usually came from a mathematics background.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, if you wanted to be a computer programmer you would have to first get a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. When electronic computers first appeared in the 1960s, established computing staff all came from electrical and mechanical engineering, mathematics, and statistics backgrounds. New skills requirements meant that the first information technology jobs went to engineers and mathematicians.

As computers evolved, the concept of a compiler, or interpreter, became possible. This is a program that is permanently resident on the computer and is the very basis of an operating system. The interpreter could translate programs written in very basic instruction sets – called assembly languages – into the machine instruction code.

This advancement enriched the capabilities of programming and made more complicated instructions possible. By the late 1960s, screens, keyboards, text editors, and languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, made programming available to those interested in a career in business, rather than only to scientists and engineers.

Scientists and engineers continued to advance computing. Programmers, business analysts, and commissioning enterprises created the field of information technology.