Computerised Systems : You would have realized by now that computing systems are most useful for manipulating information. Any organisation and management of information basically involves 3 steps:

1. Information input

2. Information processing

3. Information output.

Information is usually in the form of data. Can you think of items which could form the data in a laboratory setup?

Data could be any of the following: information about stocks, equipment, finances, personnel, technical data, student records etc. You could add more to this list according to your own situation. This data is normally stored, processed or analyzed and then we get final results based on it. Sorting information fed into the computer is one of the most important operations it performs. The computer is able to arrange similar data items in a particular order, be it, numerical, alphabetical or some other sequence. On command the computer can compare any two data items and determine which the next one in that sequence is.

A collection of similar data is known as a file and each item is a record. In a file on students for example, each record contains data about one student such as the registration number, name, date of birth etc. of a student and sorting can be done according to the type of required information.

Once data has been sorted it is stored internally on the hard disc of the computer or on a floppy or a CD and can be printed out on paper. This information in a computer can be logically organised into files with separate records within files and individual items within records. When files are arranged in a database, each record contains identification labels known as keys. A key could be a code number, a name or perhaps data. When looking for particular data, the computer calls up each item from memory and checks to see if it contains the suitable key. Therefore, when a key is entered into a record, the computer scans its memory and displays that record.