Development of Information Technology lesson | Programming and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 1 · Information Technology and Society

1-1 Development of Information Technology and Social Transformation

On an ordinary day, a student in Egypt checks messages on an SNS app, pays for breakfast with a cashless app, joins a lesson through online learning, and orders a book from an online shop. Twenty years ago, most of this was not possible. Information technology has developed through a series of stages — and at each one it changed the way people communicate, work, learn and pay.

Guiding question

How has information technology developed through its major stages, and how has each stage changed society?

Learning outcome. Explain the major stages in the development of information technology and their impact on society, and give examples of the social changes and emerging technologies it has brought about.

Key fact

At each stage, information technology introduced a new technology or service and also changed how society communicates, works and does business.

With a partner. Look at the five periods below before you read on. For each one, name one device or service from that era that you still use or hear about today. Then predict which stage changed daily life the most, and give one reason. Write your prediction down — you will come back to it at the end.

Five stages, each with a consequence

Time period	Major technologies and events	Impact on society
1940s–60s	Birth of the computer (ENIAC, vacuum tubes)	Mainly used for military and scientific computation
1970s–80s	Spread of personal computers (PCs)	Beginning of personal computer use
1990s	Commercialization of the Internet; the Web	Globalization of information; spread of email
2000s	Rise of smartphones (iPhone, etc.)	Explosive spread of mobile Internet
2010s onward	Spread of cloud computing	Large-scale data analysis and AI; “IT as a service” becomes widespread

The third column is the lesson.

It is easy to learn the dates and the machines and stop there. But the question the book asks is how each stage changed society — so every stage has to be remembered as a pair: what arrived, and what it did to people.

Press a period. Each one shows the technology that arrived and — the part that matters — what it did to ordinary life.

Every stage has BOTH columns. An answer that names only the machine has missed the question.

Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law … the empirical observation that “the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.”

This remained largely accurate for many years, and computing power increased dramatically.

But it is running into a physical wall.

In recent years, making transistors smaller has been approaching a physical limit. If circuits are made any smaller, two problems appear:

The quantum tunnelling effect — electrons slip straight through barriers that are supposed to stop them.
Leakage current — current escapes unintentionally.

Together these make it difficult to achieve higher performance and lower power consumption at the same time.

So the answer changed direction.

Instead of only shrinking parts, new routes to performance are being pursued: parallel processing using multiple processor cores, and quantum computers based on the principles of quantum mechanics.

Pause & think

Moore’s Law is called an empirical observation, not a law of nature. What is the difference — and why does that explain how it can stop being true?

Moore’s Law sounds small. “It doubles every two years.” Fine — so it grows quite fast. Let us find out how fast, because almost nobody guesses this right.

Try it before you read on: if something doubles every two years, how many times bigger is it after forty years? Write your guess down.

🎬 AnimationWhat “doubles every two years” really means

Step 1 of 6 — Start with one

Forget transistors for a moment. Start with a single square. In two years’ time there will be two. Two years after that, four. Each step just doubles what is already there. That is all Moore’s Law says.

or scrub through the steps

The thing to take away is not the exact numbers. It is that doubling looks slow at first and then becomes enormous, without ever changing speed. That single idea explains the whole timeline in this lesson — why computers were useless to ordinary people for decades and then suddenly were in everyone’s pocket.

Writing the rule down: why it is 2 to a power

Doubling means multiplying by 2. Doing that many times over is written with a power:

1 doubling = 2¹ = 2 · 2 doublings = 2² = 4 · 3 doublings = 2³ = 8 · 10 doublings = 2¹⁰ = 1,024

The only extra step for Moore’s Law is turning years into doublings. It doubles every two years, so in t years it has doubled t ÷ 2 times. Put those together and the whole rule is:

multiplier = 2^{(t ÷ 2)}

So for 40 years: 40 ÷ 2 = 20 doublings, and the multiplier is 2²⁰ = 1,048,576.

The trap. 2²⁰ is not 2 × 20. Two times twenty is forty. 2²⁰ is twenty twos multiplied together, which is over a million — and the gap between 40 and 1,048,576 is the entire reason this rule is worth stating.

🧮 The rule, with numbers you choose

Moore’s Law says the count doubles every two years. Drag the years and watch the three quantities move — they are not the same thing, and keeping them apart is the whole skill.

How many years have passed?40 years

1 · the years

how long we waited

2 · the doublings

40 ÷ 2 = 20

how many times it doubled

3 · the multiplier

2²⁰

= 1,048,576×

The rule in one line: multiplier = 2^{(years ÷ 2)} — so after 40 years it is 2^{40 ÷ 2} = 2²⁰ = 1,048,576.

Writing it out would need 20 twos multiplied together — which is exactly why we use the exponent instead. 2²⁰ is never 2 × 20; 2 × 20 would be just 40.

🧮 Working it out — how many times bigger after forty years?

1
Forty years, and it doubles every two years. So first: how many doublings? 40 ÷ 2 = 20.
Why this step: Always count the doublings first, never the years. The years only tell you how many times the doubling happens.
2
Each doubling multiplies by 2. Twenty doublings means multiplying by 2, twenty times over: 2 × 2 × 2 … twenty times.
Why this step: This is the step where people go wrong. Twenty doublings is not “twenty times bigger”. It is 2 multiplied by itself twenty times — a very different thing.
Most people slip here: Do not add. Doubling twice is not 2 + 2 = 4 times bigger by adding — it is 2 × 2. It happens to be 4 either way, which is exactly why the mistake survives so long before anyone notices.
3
Work up a few: 2 doublings = 4. 5 doublings = 32. 10 doublings = 1,024.
Why this step: Notice how it behaves. Ten doublings only got you to about a thousand — that is why the first twenty years of computers changed very little for ordinary people.
4
Now the last ten doublings: 1,024 × 1,024 = 1,048,576.
Why this step: Every extra doubling multiplies the whole total again. The second half of the time did far more than the first half, even though the rule never changed. This is the single most useful thing to understand about growth of this kind.
5
Answer: about a MILLION times bigger.
Why this step: And that is the cause of the entire table on the previous page. Nothing about what a computer IS changed between 1960 and 2010. It just kept doubling, until a machine that filled a room and cost a fortune became one that fits in a pocket and costs a month’s wages.

🪄 Think of it like — folding a piece of paper

A sheet of paper is about a tenth of a millimetre thick. Fold it and it doubles. Fold it twenty times, and if it were possible, the stack would be over a hundred metres tall — from one sheet of paper. Nothing was added; it was only ever folded in half.

Where the comparison breaks down: You cannot really fold paper more than about seven times — it gets too thick and stiff. Chips hit their own version of that wall, which is what the last step of the animation shows: transistors are now so small that electrons slip through them.

🌍 A real case — the phone in your pocket against the computer that went to the Moonمعلومة برة المنهج

The computer that guided the Apollo missions to the Moon in 1969 had roughly 4 kilobytes of memory. A single photograph on your phone is thousands of times larger than that computer’s entire memory, and the phone itself is many millions of times more powerful.

Nobody invented a fundamentally different kind of computer in between. It doubled, and doubled, and doubled. That is what the fourth row of the table means when it says smartphones spread explosively in the 2000s — the doubling had finally made a pocket-sized computer both possible and cheap.

Comparisons of the Apollo Guidance Computer with modern consumer hardware.

Why this section exists

Moore’s Law counts transistors. The book never stops to say what one is, or what having more of them buys you — and without that, “the number of transistors doubles” is a sentence about a word you cannot picture.

The middle animation below is on the syllabus: p.5 names the quantum tunnelling effect, leakage current, and parallel processing with multiple cores, and it is examinable. The first and last go beyond the book — displays and memory cells are not in this course — and are here so the examinable part has something solid underneath it.

1 · What one transistor does — and where a 1 ends up

A transistor is a switch: current flows (1) or it does not (0). Everything else follows from that. Watch one bit travel from a switch to a lit dot on a small LCD screen.

معلومة برة المنهجbeyond the official book

Displays, pixels, colour depth and buses are not in this course. This is here so that “the number of transistors” means something you can picture — the book counts them and never says what one does.

🎬 AnimationFrom one switch to one pixel — where a 1 becomes something you can see

Step 1 of 7 — A transistor is a switch, and that is all

Electricity can either flow through it or not. Flowing counts as 1; not flowing counts as 0. A tiny voltage on the GATE decides which. There is no cleverness here — it is a switch with no moving parts, which is why it can be made microscopically small and switched billions of times a second.

or scrub through the steps

The thing to hold onto is that nothing physical travels from the processor to your screen. A voltage appears at the next gate, opens it, and the pattern is handed along. The only reason a picture appears at the end is that there are enough switches, switching fast enough — which is exactly what Moore’s Law is counting.

In plain words — how data “moves” inside a processor

Nothing is carried. A transistor turns ON, which puts a voltage on the wire, which reaches the gate of the next transistor and opens it. That one does the same to the next. The pattern is handed along — like a line of people passing a message, not like a parcel being delivered.

So yes: a 1 really does travel from transistor to transistor, out of the processor, along a bus, through the graphics hardware, to the screen — where the panel has its own transistor for every subpixel. The chain never stops being switches.

2 · Why making it smaller stopped working (examinable)

Now the part the book states in a single paragraph. Take the transistor that drives one subpixel of that screen, and shrink it yourself.

معلومة برة المنهجbeyond the official book

The ideas here are on the syllabus — p.5 names quantum tunnelling, leakage current and parallel processing. The numbers are not: electron counts, the formulas n = C·V ÷ e and P = C·V²·f, and the nanometre sizes are all beyond the book.

⚡ Circuit simulation — shrink the transistor and watch what breaks

This is the transistor that drives one subpixel of the little LCD. Drag the size control from the 1990s down to today, and watch three things at once: how many electrons carry one bit, how many leak away, and how much heat is produced.

Transistor size350 nm · mid 1990s

bigger, oldersmaller, newer

electrons holding one bit

31,208

n = C × V ÷ e — and it is always a whole number, because charge comes in whole electrons

leaking away

of the power, wasted even when the switch is OFF

power per transistor

25.500 µW

switching P = C × V² × f, plus the leak — all of it becomes heat

Plenty of room. About 31,208 electrons hold this bit, and almost none escape. Making the transistor smaller here is pure gain: less power for each switch, and more of them fit on the chip. This is the era Moore’s Law was written in.

What is real here and what is a teaching model. The two formulas are the real ones: n = C·V ÷ e for the electrons and P = C·V²·f for the switching power, with e = 1.602 × 10⁻¹⁹ C. The sizes and voltages are realistic for the years named. The leakage percentage is illustrative — real leakage depends on oxide thickness, temperature and materials well beyond this syllabus. What is not invented is the shape of the story: fewer electrons per bit, a thinner barrier, more tunnelling, more heat.

In plain words — the two different meanings of “quantum” here

The word is doing two separate jobs in this topic, and it is worth keeping them apart.

1 · Charge is quantised. Electric charge comes in whole electrons and nothing smaller — there is no such thing as half an electron. That is why the dots in the simulation are countable, and why the electron count is a whole number. It is not that electrons travel in little bundles called quanta; it is that the electron is the smallest unit of charge there is.

2 · Quantum tunnelling. A completely different idea. An electron does not only behave like a tiny ball — it also behaves like a wave, and a wave is not entirely stopped by a thin barrier. So an electron can appear on the far side of a wall it never had the energy to climb. Make the barrier thinner and this happens far more often, which is why it becomes a problem only when transistors get very small.

And leakage current is the result you can measure: current escaping when the switch is supposed to be OFF. Tunnelling is one of the ways it escapes.

The book’s wording, which is what an exam wants: If circuits are made any smaller, problems arise such as the quantum tunnelling effect, in which electrons slip through barriers, and leakage current, in which current escapes unintentionally. (p.5)

🧮 Why heat is the thing that actually stops you

1
Every time a transistor switches, it uses energy: P = C × V² × f — capacitance, times voltage SQUARED, times how many times a second it switches.
Why this step: Notice the square. Voltage is the strongest lever in the whole equation: halving it cuts the switching power to a quarter. This one fact is why every generation of chips has run at a lower voltage than the last.
2
Add the leak: current escaping even when the transistor is OFF and doing no work at all.
Why this step: Switching power at least buys you something. Leakage buys nothing — it is paid every second the chip has power, whether it is computing or idle.
Most people slip here: This is why a phone gets warm in your pocket doing nothing. Idle is not free.
3
Every watt of both ends up as HEAT, inside a chip the size of a fingernail.
Why this step: Energy does not vanish. Electrons colliding with atoms in the material give up energy as heat, and it has to be carried away or the chip destroys itself.
4
Now shrink the transistors and pack in twice as many. The heat per unit area rises.
Why this step: And here is the wall the book is describing. You can no longer cool it. Making things smaller used to give more speed for less power; past a point it gives more leakage and more heat instead — so it is “difficult to achieve both higher performance and lower power consumption at the same time”.
5
So run several cores more slowly instead of one core faster.
Why this step: Because of the V² in that first line. Two cores each at a lower voltage can do more total work than one core at full voltage, for less heat. That is the book’s “parallel processing using multiple processor cores” — and it is a consequence of the equation, not a separate idea.

3 · Where a bit sits when nothing is switching

A switch carries a bit only while current flows. Memory has to keep it — and the oldest way to keep it is the same leaky physics you just met.

معلومة برة المنهجbeyond the official book

Memory cells, DRAM, SRAM and the refresh cycle are not in this course at all. They are here because they are the friendliest example of the leakage the book does describe.

🎬 AnimationWhere a bit actually sits — the leaking bucket, and what it cost to stop the leak

Step 1 of 6 — A bit has to sit somewhere

A switch can carry a 1 while current is flowing, but memory has to REMEMBER it after you stop looking. The oldest trick is a capacitor: two plates with a gap. Put charge on it and that is a 1; leave it empty and that is a 0.

or scrub through the steps

Watch the wording here, because it is the sort of thing an exam sentence turns on. Transistors did not replace capacitors. DRAM has always been one transistor and one capacitor, and still is. What happened is that a second design — six transistors, no capacitor — was chosen for the small, fast memory where refreshing would cost too much. Cheap and leaky where you need a lot; expensive and steady where you need it fast.

A sentence to get right

It is tempting to say “capacitors were replaced by transistors”. That is not quite true, and the difference is the interesting part.

DRAM — the main memory in every phone and laptop — has always been one transistor AND one capacitor per bit, and still is. The transistor is the door; the capacitor is the bucket. SRAM, the small fast memory inside the processor, uses six transistors and no capacitor, so it never needs refreshing — and costs six parts instead of two.

So it is a trade, not a replacement: cheap and leaky where you need a great deal of it, expensive and steady where you need it fast. Both are in the machine you are using now.

🌍 A real case — how few electrons a modern bit is made ofمعلومة برة المنهج

On a mid-1990s transistor, one bit sat on the gate as roughly 31,000 electrons. Lose a few hundred and nothing whatever happens.

Near today’s limit the same bit is about 100 electrons. Now losing a few hundred is not a rounding error — it is the whole bit. That is the real reason quantum tunnelling turned from a curiosity into a wall: the leak did not suddenly get bigger, the thing being protected got smaller until the leak was the same size as it.

Computed from n = C·V ÷ e with realistic capacitances and voltages for each era; e = 1.602 × 10⁻¹⁹ C.

Social changes resulting from information technology

SNS (Social Networking Service) … services that allow users to connect with each other and post and share information. They are highly effective at spreading information rapidly.

E-commerce (EC) … buying and selling goods and services through the Internet.

e.g., online shops such as Amazon and eBay

Remote work … a working style in which work is performed from home or other remote locations using the Internet.

Online learning … a learning style in which classes and study materials are delivered using the Internet.

Cashless payment … a system for making payments using electronic money, QR codes, etc., without using cash.

e.g., credit cards, debit cards, mobile payment apps

Pause & think

Of these five changes, which would be hardest to give up — and why?

Notable emerging technologies

Autonomous driving … a technology that uses AI to drive a vehicle without human operation. It uses cameras and sensors to recognise the surroundings, makes driving decisions, and controls the vehicle.

Because a delay of even 0.1 seconds can lead to an accident, edge computing is used — processing is performed instantly on the vehicle itself, rather than sending data to the cloud and waiting for a judgment to come back.

AR (Augmented Reality) … a technology that overlays digital information on real-world images.

VR (Virtual Reality) … a technology that allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual space generated by a computer.

One word tells them apart. AR adds to the real world — you still see the room. VR replaces it — the room is gone.

Quantum computing … a technology expected to dramatically speed up computations that are difficult or impossible for traditional computers, by using the principles of quantum mechanics.

Pause & think

In autonomous driving, why is it necessary to process data instantly on the vehicle using edge computing, rather than sending the data to the cloud for judgment?

How the real paper is built

The ministry sets half multiple choice and half written answer in every subject. The two halves are not the same skill. In the multiple-choice half you have to spot the wrong options quickly — and the wrong options are built out of the mistakes students really make. In the written half nobody gives you the answer to recognise; you have to produce it, in your own words, with a reason.

Practise both. Being good at one half and weak at the other costs you exactly half the paper.

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit:

If a quantity doubles every two years, how many times bigger is it after 20 years?

According to the table, the explosive spread of mobile Internet belongs to which period?

Why is the doubling described by Moore’s Law now slowing down?

Edge computing means that data is processed:

Level 1 · say what it is

1.1

State Moore’s Law, and say what has happened to it in recent years.

[2 marks]

1.2

Name three of the five periods in the development of information technology, and give the main technology or event of each.

[3 marks]

Level 2 · explain why

2.1

Explain why a quantity that merely doubles every two years grows so enormously over forty years. Support your answer with a calculation.

[4 marks]

2.2

Choose one stage from the table and explain how it changed the way people communicate, work, or learn. Give the technology and the change.

[4 marks]

Level 3 · weigh it up and decide

3.1

“The rise of smartphones changed daily life more than any other stage.” Discuss this claim, giving reasons for and against, and reach a conclusion.

[6 marks]

3.2

Explain why Moore’s Law is slowing down, and evaluate the alternatives being pursued instead.

[6 marks]

Key terms

Moore’s Law: — transistors per chip roughly double about every two years.
edge computing: — data processed on the device itself, instantly.
SNS: — connects users to post and share information.
e-commerce: — buying and selling through the Internet.
remote work: — working from home or another remote location.
online learning: — classes and materials delivered over the Internet.
cashless payment: — payment without cash (e-money, QR).
cloud computing: — IT delivered as a service over the Internet.

Worked Example

(1) Choose the option that lists the stages of IT development in the correct chronological order.

A Birth of the computer → Rise of smartphones → Commercialization of the Internet → Spread of cloud computing

B Birth of the computer → Commercialization of the Internet → Rise of smartphones → Spread of cloud computing

C Commercialization of the Internet → Birth of the computer → Spread of cloud computing → Rise of smartphones

D Rise of smartphones → Commercialization of the Internet → Birth of the computer → Spread of cloud computing

(2) Mark each statement with ○ if it is true or × if it is false.

A Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

B Moore’s Law has been said to be approaching a physical limit in recent years.

C SNS is highly effective at spreading information rapidly.

D E-commerce refers to purchasing goods at physical stores using cash.

(3) Match each description (a–c) with the choice that fits: A Autonomous driving, B AR, C VR.

a A technology that overlays digital information on real-world images

b A technology that uses AI to drive a vehicle without human operation

c A technology that allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual space generated by a computer

1 · Answer the following questions.

2(1) · For each example, which kind of change is it most closely related to?

Match each description with the choice that fits it.

A Daily lifeB Industry and the economyC Healthcare and education

Taking classes through online learning

Paying for purchases using a mobile payment app on a smartphone

Sharing photos with friends on SNS

A company introducing a work-from-home system

Match every description first.

2(2) · Which is NOT an appropriate description of an emerging technology?

Mark each statement with ○ if it is true or × if it is false.

Autonomous driving uses AI to drive a vehicle without human operation.

AR is a technology that overlays digital information on real-world images.

VR is a technology that dramatically improves the processing speed of a computer.

Quantum computing is expected to speed up computations that are difficult for traditional computers.

Mark every statement first.

Exam-style question

Analyze how the spread of cloud computing (from the 2010s onward) has changed the way information technology is used. [6] In your answer, refer to: large-scale data analysis, AI, and “IT as a service”.

Pause & think

Cashless payment is spreading in many countries. If a fully cashless society were realised, choose one advantage and one possible concern, and briefly explain the reason for each.

Think as an Engineer — Investigate & Decide

Start from the advantage and concern you named just above, then investigate further and decide.

1 · Collect data.
Survey ten classmates: do they usually pay with cash or with a cashless method (card, mobile app, or QR code)? Record the results in a table and identify the most common response.
2 · Analyze the stakeholders.
Using your survey and your own reasoning, note one benefit and one drawback of a fully cashless society for each of: a customer paying, a small shop owner, and a person with no bank card or smartphone.
3 · Decide.
Using your survey and your table, decide: should your community move toward cashless payment? Recommend one step and give two reasons.

The third group is the one worth thinking hardest about. A change that is convenient for most people can shut somebody out entirely. Noticing who is left behind by a new technology is a large part of what the rest of this chapter is about.

In a New Context

A village that has never had Internet access is connected to high-speed Internet and cashless payment for the first time. Using the stages and social changes you studied, predict two ways daily life in the village will change, and identify one new problem the village may face.

Lesson Question — Answered

The lesson asked how information technology developed and how each stage changed society. Information technology advanced through a series of stages rather than in a single step, and each stage changed much more than the technology itself. As computing spread, information became global and then mobile, many everyday activities moved online, and information technology grew into a service that supports large-scale data analysis and AI.

Each stage also brought social changes in how people communicate, work, learn and make payments. Overall, the development of information technology is not only about faster machines: at every stage it has reshaped daily life, industry, and the way society handles information.

1 · Quiz yourself first.

Cover the Point! sections and say the five stages in order, with what each one changed. Then name the five social changes and the four emerging technologies.

2 · Read the passage and answer each question.

Computers were invented in the 1940s and were initially used mainly for military and scientific computation. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, ( a ) became widespread, allowing individuals to use computers. In the 1990s, ( b ) was commercialized, advancing the globalization of information. In the 2000s, ( c ) emerged, leading to the explosive spread of mobile Internet.

3(1) · Choose all that are emerging technologies.

Mark ○ for each one that IS an emerging technology, and × for each one that is not.

Autonomous driving

Personal computers

Quantum computing

Mark every statement first.

“Choose ALL” is a different question. Four of these six are right. A question like this is really six small true-or-false questions in a row — answer each one separately rather than hunting for a single best answer.

3(2) · Which most appropriately describes the characteristics of SNS?

Mark each statement with ○ if it is true or × if it is false.

A service that allows users to connect with each other and post and share information, and is highly effective at spreading information rapidly.

A service for buying and selling goods and services through the Internet.

A working style in which one works from home or other remote locations.

A system for making payments using electronic money or QR codes without using cash.

Mark every statement first.

Reflect & challenge

Reflect: Which stage of information technology do you think will matter most in the next ten years? Give one reason. Was your prediction at the start of the lesson correct? What changed your mind?

Challenge: Choose one emerging technology from this lesson (autonomous driving, AR, VR, or quantum computing). Suggest one way it could help solve a real problem, and state one risk.

Key takeaway

Remember: information technology developed in stages — computers, the Internet, smartphones, cloud computing. At each stage it introduced a new technology or service and also changed how society communicates, works, learns and pays.

Keep reading — this lesson marks itself done automatically.