Information Systems Principles and Networking

• ISPN1
  The Stored Program Computer. Components and organisation of a simple processor. Concepts of architecture, buses and interfaces. Examples of industry standards. The execution cycle. Interrupts and their handling.
• ISPN 2
  Storage. Levels of storage. Concepts of access time and transfer rate. Comparison of construction, capacity, cost per byte, volatility. Main store organisation and uses. Backing storage: magnetic and optical devices. Organisation of discs: performance considerations, buffering, direct memory access, intelligent controllers.
• ISPN3
  Peripherals. Characteristics of common devices. Information transfer between devices. Buffering, protocols; serial and parallel transfers. Polling and interrupt techniques.
• ISPN4
  Data Transmission and Communication. Character codes; ASCII and Unicode. Simple methods of transmission and the associated hardware; asynchronous and synchronous techniques. Channel capacity. Error detection and correction.
• ISPN5
  Instruction Formats. Wordlength. Concept of an instruction set. Addressing modes. Zero, one, two and three address instructions. Variable length instructions. Reduced instruction set processors. Comparison between Pentium, Sparc and Java machines.
• ISPN6
  Operating Systems. Evolution. The functions of an operating system. The user interface. The management of processes, memory and files. Performance improvements. System start, including bootstrapping methods. Concurrent processes. Spooling. Scheduling. System security. Comparison between common operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, UNIX.
• ISPN7
  Networking. Concepts and terms. Hardware and software components of Local Area Networks (LANs). The functioning of a network: the OSI and 802 models. Comparison between the LAN and the Wide Area Network (WAN). Commercially available communication facilities. Common protocols in use on the Internet and the services they support.
• ISPN8
  Numeric and non-numeric Data. Binary representation of integers and fractions. Fixed point and floating point methods. Floating point arithmetic; normalisation. Arithmetic errors; accuracy; methods of improving accuracy. Negative numbers: practical methods. Examples in two's complement form. The IEEE standards. The storage of graphical and multimedia data. Data compression techniques.