IT101 Introduction to IT

Week 1: Introduction to Introduction to IT

Professor Karl Giannoglou
 ● NJIT Graduate
Who is this ● Full time university lecturer

Karl guy? ● Course author

● ~6 years working for a Fortune
50 company
○ Security Solutions and SOC
analyst
● GCIH, GMON, GCLD, Sec+
certified
● Giannoglou pronounced Jee -
Anne - Oh - Glue
○ (its Greek… and Turkish?)
● Extremely handsome
 ● Fundamental knowledge of IT
What will be taught basics

in this course? ● Basics of the most important

protocols
● How networking works
● Cyber security basics
● Introduction to cloud
● What you need to know for
the real world
● This is NOT a programming
class
 ● Take notes
My Advice for ○ Exams are open paper notes
this Class ● Ask questions
○ To me, Google, or to
ChatGPT

● Do your homework and

assignments on time
● Don’t be overwhelmed by all
the acronyms
● Try out some of the concepts
on your own computer/home
lab
Training Resources ● Internship
● YouTube
● Pluralsight
● Vendor classes
○ Vendor Certs
● Home labs
● CompTIA classes/certs
● Black Hills Training
● SANS ($9000 a course)
○ SANS certs
What is ● IT is the use of computers to create,

Information
store, process, retrieve, and
exchange data

Technology? ● The IT scope is huge

○ Help desk to CIO

● IT is NOT the study of algorithms

and data structures
● IT is NOT how computers work on
the physical level
○ Computer engineers are gross

● Most IT practitioners are NOT

programmers
○ Though scripting can be useful
 ● Computer Systems and

Scope of IT Hardware
● Software & Applications
● Networking and the Internet
● Database Mngmt
● Web & E-commerce
● Information Systems and
Business apps
● Cybersecurity
● Cloud computing
● Emerging technologies
Brief History of IT
and Computers ● You didn’t sign up for a
history class?
○ Too bad
● Before computers, people
still created things to make
life easier (especially
math)
● Computers have come a
long way from beads to
gears to microchips
 ● Nobody likes doing calculations
Pre-Computer Era
● People used an abacus (top img)
to handle the calculations for them
○ Error-checking
○ Faster

● Antikythera Mechanism (bottom

imgs) dated back too ~100 BC
○ Machine created to map stars
and eclipses
○ Oldest known use of a analogue
computer

● Are the operators of these devices

IT analysts?
○ Eh, not really, but we’re getting
there
Mechanical ● In the 1600s, Blaise Pascal
invented a calculator (top img)
Computer Era that could add, subtract, multiply
and divide
○ Used algorithm to multiply and
divide
○ One of first uses of algorithms
in a machine

● In the 1800s, Charles Babbage

proposed his Analytical Engine
(bottom img)
○ Used conditional logic
○ Stored memory
○ Huge leap into how we use
computers today
Electromechanical ● Punch cards (top img) were used to
store data
Computing ○ Presence or absence of holes would
be used to save a configuration
○ Largely popularized in computers by
Herman Hollerith
○ Collections of punched cards would be
programs (left img)

● Vacuum tubes (bottom img) were used

to control electrical flows
○ Were used as an essential part of
circuits
○ I’m not an electrical engineer, nor do I
pretend be one
○ Used in early computers like the
1950’s UNIVAC (right img)

● I’d say these operators are IT folks

Transistors and
Early Computers ● The first transistor (top img) was
invented in New Jersey in the
1940’s
○ Smaller, cheaper alternative to
vacuum tubes
○ First jump into semiconductors
● Early computers evolved to using
magnetic tape (see in
background of bottom img) and
magnetic disks
○ More efficient way to store
memory
Integrated Circuits ● Integrated Chips (left img), or
and Microprocessors microchips, were created to
centralize a large amount of
transistors
○ Able to do complex tasks faster
○ Memory storage, signal processing,
control logic

● The first microprocessor (right img),

or CPU, was invented
○ Gave the computer a brain
○ Can send out several tasks at once

● Now the first personal computers

were created
○ Altair 8800 (bottom computer)
○ Apple II
 ● Observation that every two
Moore’s Law years, number of transistors on
an IC will double
● Some experts claim the law will
die in 2025
● We are approaching physical
limitations
○ Transistors can only be so
small
○ Quantum computing or new
chip architecture can reimagine
limitations

● Technology moves FAST

Note that
the y-axis
increments
by the
power of 10
Personal Computer ● Computers started to adopt GUIs

Revolution and become more and more user

friendly
○ Apple and Windows started to
soar

● Companies began to adopt

reliance onto computers and
servers for speed and efficiency
○ Every org started to build their
own web servers, email servers,
databases, etc.

● Personal software took off

○ Microsoft office became a
must-have

● Everyone has a computer at home

Mobile Computing ● Smartphones become a necessity
○ I bet everyone in this class has a
and Digital smartphone

Revolution ● IoTs become more and more

commonplace
○ Smart TVs, Smart lightbulbs,
Alexas, Apple watches

● Everything now connects to the

internet
● A new economy of data harvesting
and advertising is formed
○ Everything is listening and
collecting data
○ Data about you is sold to the
highest bidder
Cloud Computing ● Cloud computing has become the
and Virtualization standard for new technologies
○ Cloud Service Providers house
huge datacenters full of hardware
○ Why pay for all the hardware
when you can rent it? We can
scale

● Now we can break down servers

and services into their own
devices
○ Even more efficient resource
allocation!
○ Virtualization and containerization
Emerging ● AI and machine learning has made
huge leaps in recent years

Technologies ○ Don’t use ChatGPT to write your

homework btw

● Big data analytics, data science, and

predictive tech are hugely important
● AI and ML are only going to grow
exponentially faster
○ What will it be like in 10 years? 20
years? idk lol

● What else…?
○ Quantum computing?
○ Fully self-driving cars?
○ Surveillance states?
○ Stuxnet? The terminator?
 ● IT is everywhere
IT and its role in ○ Everything has a computer

today’s society in it
● Effective operation and
protection of these
computers is essential
○ Healthcare system
○ Banking
○ Transport
○ Communication
● Outages can have major
consequences
2018 Baltimore 911 ● In 2018, Baltimore computer
Dispatch Hacked infrastructure was hacked
and ransomed
● 911 dispatch was in a
degraded state for 17 hours
● Shows life threatening
implications of IT upkeep

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/baltimore-s-911-emergency-system-hit-cyberattack-n860876
 ● October 2021, Facebook and

2021 Facebook subsidiaries went dark for 7 hours

○ WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook,

Outage Instagram

● Facebook made a change to BGP

causing outage
● ~$60m in ad revenue lost
● Mark Zuckerberg lost $6b in stock
● Big hit to reputation
○ People flocked to Discord, Twitter,
Telegram

● Showed average person how much

everyone uses IT
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
 ● Maintaining security is
Security of IT essential
● Bad guys are always active
○ Criminal gangs
○ Nation states
● Constant game of cat and
mouse
● Education of users
● Compliance and regulation
● Requires a lot of resources
 ● With great power comes great

Ethics responsibility
● Privacy rights
● Intellectual property and job
boundaries
● Access to technology
● Social impacts
○ Fake news/AI
○ Online harassment
○ Freedom of speech

● Doing the right thing

○ Don’t make a deal with the devil
 ● Mass utilization of computers is only

This technology about 20 years old

○ Yet nowadays it's completely

is new! essential

● The workforce for IT is very new

○ Engineers have been building
bridges for thousands of years
○ IT analysts have been around for 50
years

● IT deployment is expensive! So is the

maintenance
● Newer technologies are largely
unlearned
○ Ex: Cloud computing, security tools

● The job market is hot

 ● STEM can be boring… So why are we
Jobs in IT here?
○ We want money

● IT is one of the highest paying job

fields in the world
○ New Jersey area pays a lot
○ You could come out of NJIT making
$100k a year

● As the scope of IT is big, so are the

potential jobs (and there’s a lot of
overlap)
○ Security
○ Networking
○ Cloud
○ Database
○ Gaming
○ Developer
○ AI
○ Programming
○ Data
 ● Get work experience NOW
○ Networking

My thoughts on
■ shake some hands
■ Call in a few favors
○ Money, experience, college creds
the job market… ● Start salary high
● Get certified
○ Cloud certs
○ CompTIA certs
● Learn the sought-after tech
○ Cloud
● Build a home lab
○ DNS servers
○ DNS sinkholes
○ Vuln scanning
○ Hack your smart devices
● Stay current
○ Blog posts
○ Newsletters
What is data? ● Data is any sequence of one
or more symbols
● Requires interpretation
● Can be at rest, in transit, in
use
● Digital data is represented in
binary at lowest form
● Requires a medium
 ● Collection of data

What is a file? ● Has a name

● Has a location/directory
● Has attributes
○ Creation date
○ Modified data
○ Size

● Normally has a file extension

● Categorized into binary or text file
○ Binary file requires a program to
interpret
○ Text file is human readable and can
be modified with text editor
Kinds of data ● Data can be structured or
unstructured
○ Typically quantitative vs
qualitative

● Data comes in different forms

○ Spreadsheets, images, videos,
audios, text, etc.

● Data often identifiable by its file

extension
○ Exception is some Linux files,
hidden files

● Metadata
Data Structures ● Storage used to store and organize
data
● Linear, where data is attached to
previous and next data element
○ Stack, array, queue, list, etc.

● Non-linear, where data is not

sequentially placed
○ Tree, graph, etc.

● Used for processing, retrieving as

well
● When data is “deleted” the data
structure is marked to be
overwritten
 ● Use of storage media to retain
data
Data Storage
● Uses electromagnetic, optical, or
silicon-based storage media
● Hard Disk Drives (HDDs),
Solid-state drives (SSDs), optical
disc drives, removable media, etc.
● Data is not removed until deleted
● Divided into primary and
secondary storage
○ Primary is faster and generally
smaller (SSD)
○ Secondary is larger, cheaper,
slower (HDD)
Memory ● Random-Access Memory or
RAM
● Volatile storage used to
temporarily store data that the
processor needs quickly
● Provides fast read and write
access times
● Different from storage as it is
fast, expensive, volatile
 ● Communication between a
I/O computer system and its external
environment
Input/Output ● Input refers to data or instructions
given to the computer
○ Ex: Typing cmd on a keyboard
○ Ex: Reading a file

● Output refers to the info produced

by the computer
○ Ex: Comp sends cmd output to
screen
○ Ex: Writing to a file

● IO operations can be a bottleneck

○ Efficient IO handling is important
Caching ● Storing freq accessed or
recently used data in
faster, closer, more
accessible location for
better performance
● Uses locality
● Can be used in the CPU,
Disk (RAM), Web
 ● Temporary storage area used
Buffer to hold data when being
transferred
● Commonly used in IO
operations, network
communications, inter-process
communication
● Allow for efficient read and
write of data
● Have defined sizes
○ Can cause buffer overflow
Binary ● At the lowest level, computers read
everything as 1s and 0s
● Representation of a data by a 0 or 1
● Each binary digit is called a bit
● Each position represents a power of
two
○ 2 digits = 4 possibilities
○ 3=8
○ 4 = 16

● 8 bits represents one byte

○ Bytes often represent characters,
numerical expressions, or assembly
language code
○ Foundational units in computer
memory
 ● Converting data into another
Encoding form of data
● Used for efficient storage,
obfuscation, transmission, or
processing
● Char encoding used so
computer can read human
text
● Can be used to hide
malicious text in malware
● Can be used to zip files
Hexadecimal ● Hexadecimal, hex, or
base16
● Way to represent binary in a
more human-readable form
○ NOT encoding
● Uses 16 symbols (0-9, A-F)
○ 0 is 0, 1 is 1, A is 10, F is 15
● Used to describe colors,
memory locations,
advanced analytics
 ● American Standard Code for
ASCII Information Interchange
● Encodes text
● 7 bit character encoding, allowing for
128 characters
○ English characters and symbols

● Each character has a unique code

that computers can easily process
● Ensures text based data is
interchanged consistently
● Files often store text in ASCII format
(ex: language files like python and C)
 ● Encodes text
Unicode ○ Typically using UTF-8

● ~150,000 characters
○ Support for various
languages, symbols, emojis

● Very important for

internationalization of
computers
● Implemented in many OSes,
programming languages,
XML, JSON, etc.
Data Units

● Data units with bits are typically used in network speeds (Ex: Kbps, Gbps)
Applications ● So… who cares?

of Data ● Data is used in every process

of a computer and network
● Some data is secret
○ Trade secrets, gov docs,
customer data, passwords

● Data harvesting = big money

○ How does Google.com make
money?
○ How does Whatsapp make
money?
○ How does social media make
money?
Google’s Data
● In 2020, 80% of
Profiles Google.com’s profits came
from advertising
● Google gathers information
about you and creates a
profile
● Google caters ads to you
● Alternative is Duckduckgo
● They don’t pay me enough
to go down this rabbit hole