书摘
HISTORY OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
A review of the history of information systems includes a look
back at the hardware and how it has been applied. In the half
century since the first general-purpose digital computer was
installed in a business organization, the hardware has experienced
many-fold increases in speed and capacity along with dramatic
reductions in size. Concurrently, the computer applications have
evolved from relatively straightforward accounting processes to
systems designed to support managers and other problem solvers.
THE EVOLUTION IN COMPUTER HARDWARE
Electronic computers as we know them today can be traced to a
machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator
(ENIAC), which was developed in 1946 by John W.Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert. At the time, they were working as engineers at the
University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC was the predecessor of the
Remington Rand UNIVAC I, which was the first widely marketed
universal automatic computer.
The first UNIVAC I was installed in a government organization,
the U.S. Census Bureau,in 1951. Three years later, the same type
of machine was installed in the first business organization,
General Electric. Figure 1.1 is a photograph of a UNIVAC. These
machines performed fewer than 2,000 calculations per
second---extremely slow compared to the 2 billion or more
instructions per second that are common for today's smallest and
least expensive microcomputers. These early computers focused on a
single task requested by a single user, and were called
mainframes. The term mainframe is still in use today, but now is
used to describe the large, centrally located computers typically
found in large organizations.
Although IBM was not the first computer manufacturer, it was
not long before it became the industry leader. By the end of the