Google

Technical Support Fundamentals

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Course 1 of 6 in the Specialization Google IT Support Professional Certificate

In this course, you’ll be introduced to the world of Information Technology, or IT. This course is the first of a series that aims to prepare you for a role as an entry-level IT Support Specialist. You’ll learn about the different facets of Information Technology, like computer hardware, the Internet, computer software, and job-related skills. You’ll also learn about the history of computers, and the pioneers who shaped the world of computing that we know today. This course covers a wide variety of topics in IT that are designed to give you an overview of what’s to come in this IT Support Professional Certificate. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to: - understand how the binary system works. - assemble a computer from scratch. - choose and install an operating system on a computer. - understand what the Internet is, how it works, and the impact it has in the modern world. - learn how applications are created and how they work under the hood of our computer. - utilize common problem-solving methodologies and soft skills in an Information Technology setting. Except as otherwise noted, the contents on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

From the lesson

Introduction to IT

Welcome to Technical Support Fundamentals, the first course of the IT Support Professional Certificate! By enrolling in this course, you are taking the first step to kickstarting your career in tech. In the first week of the course, we'll learn about how computers were invented, how they've evolved over time, and how they work today. We will also learn about what an "IT Support Specialist" is and what they do in their job. By the end of this module, you will know how to count like a computer using binary and understand why these calculations are so powerful for society. So let's get started!

Computer Language3:00

Character Encoding3:04

Binary2:40

How to Count in Binary3:04

Meet the Instructors

Google

Remember when I said that a computer is a device that stores and

processes data by performing calculations?

Whether you're creating an artificial intelligence that can beat humans at chess

or something more simple, like running a video game,

the more computing power you have access to, the more you can accomplish.

By the end of this lesson,

you'll understand what a computer calculates, and how.

Let's look at this simple math problem.

0 +1 equals what?

It only takes a moment to come up with the answer 1, but

imagine that you needed to do 100 calculations that were this simple.

You could do it, and if you were careful, you might not make any mistakes.

Well, what if you needed to do 1,000 of these calculations?

How about 1 million? How about 1 billion?

This is exactly what a computer does.

A computer simply compares 1s and 0s, but millions or billions of times per second.

Wowza!

The communication that a computer uses is referred to as binary system,

also known as base-2 numeral system.

This means that it only talks in 1s and 0s.

You may be thinking, okay, my computer only talks in 1s and 0s.

How do I communicate with it?

Think of it like this.

We use the letters of the alphabet to form words and we give those words meaning.

We use them to create sentences, paragraphs, and whole stories.

The same thing applies to binary, except instead of A, B, C, and so on,

we only have 0 and 1 to create words that we give meaning to.

In computing terms, we group binary into 8 numbers, or bits.

Technically, a bit is a binary digit.

Historically, we used 8 bits because in the early days of computing,

hardware utilized the base-2 numeral system to move bits around.

2 to the 8th numbers offered us a large enough range

of values to do the computing we needed.

Back then, any number of bits was used, but

eventually the grouping of 8 bits became the industry standard that we use today.

You should know that a group of 8 bits is referred to as a byte.

So a byte of zeroes and ones could look like 10011011.

Each byte can store one character, and we can have 256 possible values,

thanks to the base-2 system, 2 to the 8th.

In computer talk, this byte could mean something like the letter C.

And this is how computer language was born.

Let's make a quick table to translate something a computer might see into

something we'd be able to recognize.

What does the following translate to?

Did you get hello?

Pretty cool, right?

By using binary, we can have unlimited communication with our computer.

Everything you see on your computer right now, whether it's a video,

an image, text or anything else, is nothing more than a 1 or a 0.

It is important you understand how binary works.

It is the basis for everything else we'll do in this course, so

make sure you understand the concept before moving on.