h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Suddenly there is no such thing as IT people. Job ads, the computer people at Uni, news articles; all refer to them as IS. Information Systems I presume that stands for .. so what's the difference between Information Technology and Information systems as why oh why oh why?!

Hardware / software?

As far as I can tell IS is used in exactly the same context IT always was. For example, just seen an advert for a computer developer/programmer type company as "IS solutions". It's just like I blinked and an entire industry has rebranded ITself (see what I did there)

OOops!

I thought this was one of the 's new threads



*waits for the to NOTICE that IT has become IS*

I've always hated the term ICT, especially as the people who use the phrase almost always use it in the wrong context.

When I started working it was called 'DP', or 'ADP': (Automatic) Data Processing. Computers, and the experts who operated/programmed them, were kept well away from the business, usually in the basement.

When it was decided that computers should be less of a black art and more aligned to give value to the business, they started rebranding this function. I think I saw 'IS' used first, then 'IT', which has stuck. 'ICT' was used exclusively in schools, as far as I can tell - nobody I've met professionally has ever used that acronym.

It was Information Systems back in the 80s, then in around 1990 they started calling it IT.

That's odd then, because everywhere I look now I see a proliferation of IS. Maybe it's making a comeback?

Although things appear to be circular, whereas IS used to be Information Systems it now stands for Information Stuff. It follows the rebranding of ICT as ICS (Interesting Coding Stuff)

You must believe in the Computer, or it will send plagues of mice and blue screens of death.

It's an evolutionary thing.

What happened is you had Information Systems. That was all about big rooms where you fed in some mysterious bunches of blue cards with mysterious holes in them and got back these mysterious concertinas of paper with green and white stripes on them, covered with mysterious numbers.

Then these computer thingies arrived on desks. Everyone realised they were roughly the same kind of beast as IS (whatever the hell that was!)...only...new!...and different! They needed a new, better, name for something newer and better. They'er 'Technology' aren't they? Let's call them Information Technology!

And all this IT bred and and bred until it was everywhere. It became a 'Meh' thing - the thing you use to play Solitaire on. No longer exciting. The new, better stuff was the stuff going on...wherever the hell it goes on...making all the stuff that goes down some kind of electric string somewhere (probably) or teh wifey (whatever the hell that is) and makes pretty pictures on your screen. And so this needed a newer, better name...

There's an island off the Newfoundland coast that alternates between having too many wolves and too many deer. It's a bit like that, when you think about it.

"and makes pretty pictures on your screen"

That became Graphic User Interface, which had the unappetizing acronym GUI.

Is that not related to GIMP? or am I looking at the wrong websites again?

There's also WYSIWYG.

Although sometimes Word gets the formatting wrong. Then it's more like Wisnae WYG.







Perhaps that only works in Scots.

I'll take your Word for it.

In my uni IS is Information Services not Information systems.

But then they have been merged with the library...

That happens a lot. Don't worry about it. Librarians know their way around computers nowadays.

More so than the library in my experience.

I once went to ours when the system was down once and I had a much better idea of what is in there (at least in my section of interest) than they did

I used to weed the collection in my library, so I knew what was there.