Unit Objectives

The objective of Unit #1: IT Careers is to learn the 16 key vocabulary terms below. This is accomplished by completing the unit reading and unit activities.

Unit Vocabulary

Below is a list of key vocabulary terms in this unit.

CIO (chief information officer)

an executive position responsible for internal processes and practices; normally has a stronger business administration background than technical background

The CIO's work is often quite varied, ranging from managing a company's IT budget to overseeing staff outsourcing.

CTO (chief technical officer)

an executive position responsible for all scientific and technological issues related to a company; normally has a strong technical and somewhat less strong management background

The CEO decided to fire the CTO after the company's IT department lost a year of financial records due to poor backup procedures.

DBA (database administrator)

a person in charge of managing and maintaining relational databases and their access rights

The requirements for the DBA job position were: advanced SQL, performance tuning, and disaster recover for ORACLE systems.

database developer

a position responsible for programming and optimizing databases

The database developer spent three months refactoring the company database to obtain 3NF (third normal form).

enterprise architect

a high-level position responsible for understanding a business's overall needs and then designing an IT structure to support it

The firm hired an enterprise architect to oversee the development of the new software platform.

graphic designer

a position responsible for the creation of images, typography, mock-ups for an organizations's front end systems; normally works under a company Art Director

The graphic designer had an iMac with a 27" screen, a graphics tablet instead of a mouse, and the latest version of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop software.

information architect

a position responsible for making complex data structures easy to understand and navigate; especially critical at the beginning of new software development projects to ensure the application performs in a useful way for it's intended end-users

The information architect came prepared to the meeting with some wireframes and a glossary of target vocabulary for the project.

IT manager

a job position acting as a bridge between upper management and IT; one who encourages personal development in IT staff; the boss of an IT worker

The IT Manager said the new junior developer's attitude was unacceptable.

IT security manager

a position responsible for setting best practices for securing wi-fi networks, servers, backups, laptops, and VPNs.

The IT security manager ran a password cracker on his own network users to sniff out weak passwords.

IT support engineer

a position responsible for front-line maintenance, repair of the Office IT infrastructure and well as on-demand support for end-users

An IT support engineer must be able to troubleshoot and fix almost any hardware, software, or network problem that can affect an end-user's PC.

network administrator

a position responsible for maintenance of all aspects of a computer network; often a specialist in TCP/IP, Linux, and related routing technology such as Cisco

"The Network is down" is a phrase a good network administator never wants to hear.

PM (project manager)

a position responsible for organizing and delivering a project on time and on budget; often acts a bridge between developers and stake-holders

Software project managers are increasingly turning to Scrum and other Agile practices to get good results from their teams.

QA manager (quality assurance manager)

a job title whose responsibilities include ensuring appropriate performance for a software project and organizing and instructing testers

The QA manager organized a massive usability test to try to squash bugs before the software's release date.

software developer

a position responsible for gathering information around a programming task and performing it

Software developers often specialize in a specific software framework or paradigm such as Java applications, Python, or CSS.

software tester

a job title whose responsibilities include ensuring that a software project meets established quality guidelines.

The software tester spent all day documenting a nasty bug in the ERP software.

technical writer

a position responsible for the creation and maintenance of documentation relating to an IT project including online help, user guides, white papers, and design specifications

The technical writer wanted to write novels when she was young, but now she is documenting accounting software applications for IBM.

Unit Objectives

The objective of Unit #2: People in IT is to learn the 25 key vocabulary terms below. This is accomplished by completing the unit reading and unit activities.

Unit Vocabulary

Below is a list of key vocabulary terms in this unit.

Print Version

Alan Mathison Turing

(23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954) English computer scientist known as the "father of computer science"; inventor of a famous test, which is used as a empirical basis for what makes a computer a computer

Alan Turing helped invent the 'Tunny' machine which cracked the Germans 'Enigma machine' encryption code during World War II.

Andy Grove

(born 2 September 1936) Hungarian-American Chairman of Intel Corporation during much of its rapid financial growth in the 1980's and 1990's

The Wall Street spokesman said that Andy Grove is not just a great scientist, but a financial genius as well.

Bill Gates

(born October 28, 1955) American founder of Microsoft Corporation and developer of Windows; he was the richest man in the world for many years before he gave away a lot of his wealth to charity.

The boy told his mother he wanted to be as rich as Bill Gates.

Bjarne Stroustrup

(born December 30, 1950) Danish inventor of the C++ programming language

Bjarne Stroustrup's non-research interests include general history, light literature, photography, and music.

Charles Babbage

(December 26, 1791 - October 18, 1871) English mathematician, analytical philosopher who drew up plans for the first programmable computer called the Difference Engine

Charles Babbage would likely be overwhelmed at the power of a typical desktop computer today.

Dennis Ritchie

(born September 9, 1941) American inventor of the C programming language

Dennis Ritchie did a really good job when writing the C programming language in 1969, because it's still widely used today.

Edgar Frank Codd

(August 23, 1923 - April 18, 2003) English computer scientist known for his work in inventing the "relational model" for databases, which is still in use today

Edgar Frank Codd was known for pressuring IBM to introduce RBDMs to its customers, which later provided huge benefits to everyone.

George Boole

(2 November 1815 - 8 December 1864) English mathematician and philosopher who invented the boolean value

All modern computers owe a debt to George Boole's algebraic calculations.

Gordon Moore

(born January 3, 1929) American co-founder of Intel Corporation and the author of a law later named after him which predicts the speed increase of integrated circuits over time

Gordon Moore donated $600 million to Caltech in 2001, which is perhaps the largest gift ever to an institution of higher education.

Guido van Rossum

(born Jan 31, 1956) Dutch inventor of the Python programming language

Guido van Rossum has been working at Google since 2005, where he is allowed to spend half his day improving the Python language.

James Gosling

(born May 19, 1955) Canadian computer scientist known as the father of the Java langage.

James Gosling earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with a doctoral thesis entitled, "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints".

John Warner Backus

(December 3, 1924 - March 17, 2007) American computer scientist known for leading the team who invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language

John Warner Backus was famous in computer circles for inventing FORTRAN, as well as his formal language definition called the Backus-Naur form (BNF).

Ken Thompson

(born February 4, 1943) American co-inventor of the Unix Operating system in 1969 while working for AT&T; he also invented the 'B' programming language and worked on the UTF-8 character set

Ken Thompson wrote many books including 1995's 'Plan 9 from Bell Labs'.

Larry Wall

(born September 27, 1954) American programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.

Larry Wall oversees development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project.

Linus Torvalds

(born December 28, 1969) Finnish creator of the Linux operating system in 1991; his motivation was to create a Unix-like Operating System for the x86 processor as an alternative to Windows, which he described as a "broken toy"

Linus Torvalds will go down in history as the father of Linux, the 'Unix for the masses'.

Ralph Baer

(born March 8, 1922) German-American who was instrumental in inventing the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console

In the late 1970's Ralph Baer invented Simon, a very popular electronic game, which looks suspiciously like the Google Chrome logo.

Rasmus Lerdorf

(born November 22, 1968) Danish inventor of the PHP programming language, currently the world's most popular web programming language.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for inflaming object-oriented gurus by stating that procedural code is sometimes a better and faster approach for speed and scalability on the Web.

Richard Stallman

(born March 16, 1953) American freedom activist and founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation

Richard Stallman is a renowned programmer and activist whose major accomplishments include: copyleft, GNU Emacs, and the GNU C Compiler.

Robert Noyce

(December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990) American engineer and businessman nicknamed "The Mayor of Silicon Valley", he co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968

There is a book about Robert Noyce called, 'The Man Behind the Microchip'.

Seymour Cray

(September 28, 1925 - October 5, 1996) American supercomputer architect who founded the company named after himself; he quickly became known as manufacturing the world's fastest computers for over 30 years

Before he died in a car accident, Seymour Cray predicted the decline of the supercomputer because of the tremendous growth in speed of the PC.

Steve Jobs

(February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011) American founder and former CEO of Apple Computer in 1976 and a leading figure in the computer industry; he helped popularize the concept of the home computer and was one of the first to see the commercial potential of the GUI and mouse

Steve Jobs was known for making high quality computers which were fashionable and extremely usable.

Steve Wozniak

(born August 11, 1950) American co-founder of Apple Computer, fifth grade math teacher, and famous for designing the first commercially successful home computer (Apple II)

Steve Wozniak is a well-respected figure in the history of computing because of his love of people and technology over money.

Tim Berners-Lee

(born 8 June 1955) Englishman known as the father of the World Wide Web; in 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project based based on URIs, HTTP and HTML; he also founded the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C )in 1994

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted because of his remarkable invention, the World Wide Web.

Vannevar Bush

(March 11, 1890 - June 28, 1974) American Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare; he also came up with an idea called the 'memex' which was a forefather to hypertext.

in 1949 Vannevar Bush wrote the important article, 'As We May Think', which laid out the fundamental properties and vision for multimedia and hypertext.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

(born April 14th, 1965) Japanese creator of the Ruby programming language, considered to be the most object-oriented language ever created

Yukihiro Matsumoto is a member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has served on missions.

Unit Objectives

The objective of Unit #3: The Internet is to learn the 15 key vocabulary terms below. This is accomplished by completing the unit reading and unit activities.

Unit Vocabulary

Below is a list of key vocabulary terms in this unit.

Print Version

ARPANET (Advanced Projects Research Agency Network)

the predecessor to the Internet developed by ARPA and the first worldwide network with packet switching

The current public Internet owes a big debt to ARPANET, which was the original global network.

backbone

a central high speed network that connects smaller, independent networks

Homeland Security is worried that an attack on the Internet backbone could cripple the country for weeks or months.

BBS (Bulletin Board System)

a predecessor to modern websites, these were early online communities that users could dial into using a modem

The network administrator ran his own BBS as a boy back in the 1980s.

cookie

a text file created by web sites which contains personal information about an end user

The web's use of cookies is quite controversial because most users have no idea that their information is being collected and stored on their computer.

domain name

the unique name which identifies a web site.

The domain name of Microsoft Corporation is microsoft.com

download

The transfer a file or files from a remote computer to the user's computer

The professor asked us to download the example database from the school's server.

e-commerce (electronic commerce)

The term for buying and selling goods and services over the world wide web

Although e-commerce started out small, it has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry.

emoticon

A symbol that uses the characters on a computer keyboard to convey emotion an email or instant message, such as the smiley face :)

One of the most popular emoticons is perhaps the wink and smile ;) which is used to convey irony or satire.

hyperlink

A document cross-reference technique enabling the retrieval of a related document or resource simply by clicking on an underlined word or image.

The man made a hyperlink from his personal homepage to his friend's business.

hypertext

any electronic cross-referencing document first prophesized by Vannevar Bush in 1945

The woman asked her professor if the textbook was available as hypertext.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

the coding or tagging syntax used to write documents for web browsers

A good web developer will know most HTML tags without looking in a book.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

the address which specifies the location of a file on the Internet

One uses a URL to go directly to a particular web site.

upload

to transfer a file from a local computer to a remote computer

The boy decided to upload a picture of his new girlfriend to his Facebook page.

WWW (World Wide Web)

a global hypertext system operating on the Internet that enables electronic communication of text and multimedia.

The World Wide Web is the best thing to happen to computing since birth of the PC.

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

an organization which develops specifications and guidelines for the World Wide Web.

The W3C recommends that Web developers no longer use font tags in their HTML documents.

Unit Objectives

The objective of Unit #4: Introduction to Software is to learn the 12 key vocabulary terms below. This is accomplished by completing the unit reading and unit activities.

Unit Vocabulary

Below is a list of key vocabulary terms in this unit.

Print Version

abort

to end a program or a process before its completion

When the word processor application crashed, the user had to abort the program and lose all his unsaved changes.

bug

an error in a computer program

An average developer will create one bug for every 10 lines of code written.

closed source

software in which the license stipulates that the user cannot see, edit, or manipulate the source code of a software program

I wanted to develop a new feature for the program, but I couldn't because it was closed source.

compatible

capable of being used without modification

The IBM 360 was the first commercially successful computer family with a wide range of compatible parts.

crash

a computer failure due to faulty hardware or a serious software bug

The user was advised to reboot the computer after a serious crash in which the computer no longer responded.

end user

a person who uses a product or service on a computer

Developers must maintain a close relationship with end users if they want to have a successful career.

error

an incorrect action attributable to poor judgment, ignorance, or inattention

The computer reported a "division by zero" error and automatically aborted the program.

execute

to start a program on a computer

The program was set to execute every night at midnight.

feature

something a computer program is "supposed" to do; these are often reasons to use a particular program or upgrade to a more recent version

The man upgraded his copy of Word because of a new feature that allowed him to spell-check documents in Spanish.

open source

a program in which the code is distributed allowing programmers to alter and change the original software as much as they like

The article stated that many programmers prefer open source solutions because they can modify features and fix bugs without waiting for an upgrade or patch from the manufacturer.

programmer

a person who writes or modifies computer programs or applications

The software company needed to hire three new programmers to help debug their flagship application.

proprietary

privately developed and owned technology

Because of proprietary code, you may not modify or redistribute the source code of Windows or Macintosh operating systems.