The Digital Hand: Volume II: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunication

The Digital Hand: Volume II: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries.
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The modern workplace has experienced a complete shift in how we spend our time. Time management has been optimized, and the efforts put into every-day tasks have been lightened. Employee productivity and efforts have been improved, allowing them to place more emphasis on more important things such as precision and creativity.

The level of expectation of clients and co-workers has also changed as a result of technology in the workplace, keeping everyone connected on a constant basis. Results are expected much faster than ever before. Technology has given us a level of communication never seen before. We can literally connect to any one of our employees, leaders and co-workers any time, anywhere.

With this dramatic increase in collaboration comes a heightened level of flexibility in communication, allowing co-workers to facilitate continued partnership no matter where each individual may be. Team work is much more engaged, and boosted to a whole new level. The bottom line of any business is to achieve profitability.

With the advent of technology in the workplace comes an encouraged productivity in finance. Businesses are much more fiscally healthy as a result of innovative technological equipment and software entering the office scene. As employees are encouraged to optimize their time thanks to such technology, a lot less time is wasted, and a lot more time is used to hone in on the profitable tasks at hand.

A productive workplace is a profitable one, which is just one of the important ways that technology has changed our workplace environment for the better. The security of company information can be severely compromised without the implementation of proper channels of technology and software. Just as savvy hackers are using technology to try to gain access to a businesses' sensitive information, so should a company implement innovative technology as a safe haven against such breaches of security.

James W. Cortada

However, even at the beginning there were enough users to justify the investment needed to build simple software packages: Although there was priced software available for a number of microcomputers, the Apple II was the first one to find a broad commercial audience, primarily because of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, which was initially available only on the Apple II. Nineteen eighty-one was a significant year for the microcomputer industry as the IBM Personal Computer PC dramatically expanded the market.

IBM was moved to enter this marketplace because its large and midrange systems business had been impacted by the smaller, cheaper microcomputers. IBM broke with its traditions, using commercially available hardware components and third-party software with non-exclusive marketing agreements. It rapidly became the industry standard for hardware. After IBM introduced its Personal Computer, PCs became a must-have on every business desk, replacing dumb terminals for On Line Transaction Processing applications and for individual use applications like word processing and spreadsheets.

These machines then became powerful enough to perform the fundamental operations needed in small businesses and the VAR channel morphed from supporting minicomputers to supporting these new PCs. In , the first birthday of the PC, 75 percent of the independent software industry wrote software products for this platform.

By using a commonly available operating system, IBM stood the nascent software industry on its head. Together with Microsoft and the chip-maker Intel, it effectively produced an ad hoc industry standard. Most companies that hoped to outperform this standard configuration sometimes succeeded technically but failed commercially. There were some major early microcomputer software product areas. Word Processing software leadership came in waves. But the challenge of maintaining its old command structure and modernizing the product was too much.

By , it yielded leadership to MultiMate, a procedural clone of the dedicated Wang word processor, and to Samna, a virtual clone of the Lanier word processor.

The Digital Hand - James W. Cortada - Oxford University Press

All of these companies and their products were overwhelmed by Microsoft with its new Word program which became an international, de facto, industry standard in the s. Poor quality product revisions for dBase IV and failure to produce a compiler driven version, combined with the entry of Paradox and rBase, eroded this dominant position.


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Today, various relational database management systems compete in the personal computer database market. VisiCalc was the first and the leading spreadsheet program until , when a little startup company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, turned this segment of the software industry around. It not only provided another reason for people to buy a PC, but it outsold VisiCalc within the first year of its existence. Together with word processors and database management systems, the Lotus spreadsheet program stimulated the business market and the incredible growth in the use of microcomputers.

Lotus too was later outmaneuvered by Microsoft and was replaced by the Excel spreadsheet program, which became the international, de facto, standard. In Apple introduced a very friendly visual user interface on its new Macintosh computer, based on creative work at Xerox PARC in the s. Software companies did not find the Macintosh market large enough to be willing to invest the skills and time required to produce software programs to run on that platform. Macintosh penetration hovered around ten percent of the corporate market among the IT departments that installed and maintained applications.

But its penetration in marketing departments or wherever graphic artists are employed was and is much higher.

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This was because the Apple operating system and screen graphics were significantly more responsive to the needs of these specialized users. Microsoft labored for many years to produce an effective competitor to the Macintosh operating system, but did not succeed until when it delivered Windows 3.

In , for the first time, a microcomputer software company reached the top of the list of largest software companies, as Lotus replaced Cullinet for sales. In , the top two software companies were both microcomputer software vendors: Ashton-Tate was also among the top ten software companies.

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It held that position through the s and through most of the first decade after , until Oracle with its mix of products and SAP with its manufacturing programs became the leading software vendors. If any event could be marked as a significant milestone for networking, it would be the National Computer Conference in Las Vegas.


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General Motors and other users demonstrated a multi-vendor local area network LAN on the floor of the National Computer Conference, proving it could be done. In another connectivity milestone, 53 percent of sites that had both mainframes and PCs had some sort of links between the two by , or planned to implement such links, according to Computer Intelligence Corp. Developed from Arpanet, the critical initial application for the Internet was email, which introduced personal computers to the home and supported the growth of e-Commerce. Then the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee for CERN, opened up the growth of information searching and the exchange of information, pictures, audio, and video to everyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Although the Internet and World Wide Web have become ubiquitous and are used by everyone in business and personal reasons, they have not resulted in the creation of large, independent software products companies. Netscape was successful in with its browser based on Mosaic, which was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. However most of the growth has been through Software as a Service SaaS companies that build specialized software, but do not sell it directly.

Rather, they earn their revenue from advertising embedded in their responses to queries or entries from their users. This is not a software products model and there are no software products firms which have become significant in this marketplace. The development of machines for games and physical interaction has provided another multi-billion dollar market for software packages. There are a number of companies that sell game software, and some of these have become significant in size.

Computers are now everywhere, but we rarely see them. We do not even use them as computers, since they are embedded as custom chips in watches, satellite navigation devices, cameras, personal digital assistants, and more recently in multipurpose hand-held devices that provide voice communications, take pictures, show video, and play music.

The programming is all special purpose and produced by or for the manufacturers of the devices.

How Does Technology Impact Your Daily Life?

From a software industry standpoint, the biggest change has been that there are virtually no major software companies producing the programs for these platforms. The new frontier is non-computer devices that can perform various application functions. Smart phones and tablets represent a new generation of mobile devices that have created a massive market for application programs.

The Apple iPhone and iPad have hundreds of thousands of applications, each of which performs a useful or entertaining function for users. Producing apps for smart phones and tablets is a marketplace for individuals who create high performance software products; these are marketed through the companies selling the equipment on which the apps operate. But, again, no specific software firms have become major players.

Software products have been the heart of the software industry. There have always been more programmers working for individual companies and institutions than working for software companies; and there have always been a large number of programmers doing custom programming on a professional services basis. Nevertheless, the bulk of the revenues and profits from producing software were from software companies and now from the Software as a Service companies.

The multiplication factor of writing a program once and having it used thousands, or millions, of times is comparable to the difference between handcrafted and mass-produced goods. This multiplication factor is more significant with software than with any hardware product. It costs virtually nothing to replicate a software program. In contrast to a manufactured product that still requires materials and labor and the cost of physical delivery and the physical space that it uses, software is simply bits and bytes, delivered electronically and stored on memory devices that get more compact and less expensive every year.

Software represents the ultimate in function over form. It consumes little energy and takes up virtually no space. Software represents the ability of people to conceive and create semi-intelligent systems that can perform almost any task that humans can define; and except for the cost of design and implementation which can be very substantial , it is infinitely replicable and usable at little to no cost.

Software programs drive our world. The history of the development of software and the people and companies who design and build them is a fascinating one; we look forward to the many more chapters that remain to be written. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 53, no. American Mathematical Society Proceedings 2, Communications of the ACM 13, no.

The Changing World of Media & Communication

Tim Berners-Lee and R. Proposal for a HyperText Project. From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry. The Digital Hand Volume 2: Introduction Computer hardware and computer software are like Siamese twins. Mainframe Computers, 1st and 2nd Generation: Retrieved from " https: