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To comply with Wikipedia\'s quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten. Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions. |
A university computer lab containing many desktop PCs
Information Age (also known as the Digital Age and Wireless Age) is a term that has been used to refer to the present era. The name alludes to the global economy\'s shift in focus away from the production of physical goods (as exemplified by the industrial age) and toward the manipulation of information.
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The relatively recent field of information technology concerns the use of computer-based information systems to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information. Technological advances in this field have changed lifestyles around the world and spawned new industries around the personal computer.
Early electronic computers were big, costly, and available only to universities and big corporations. Before the 1990s, most discoveries in information technology were driven by full time researchers having access to the high priced equipment.
In the 1980s, however, small computers started to become available. A personal computer, or PC, is generally a microcomputer intended to be used by one person at a time, and suitable for general purpose tasks such as word processing, programming, editing or playing a personal computer game, and is usually used to run software not generally written by its user. Unlike minicomputers, a personal computer is usually owned by the person using it, indicating a low cost of purchase and simplicity of operation. The user of a modern personal computer may have significant knowledge of the operating environment and application programs, but is not necessarily interested in programming nor even able to write programs for the computer.
The term PC was popularized by Apple Computer and soon after many other companies began offering personal computers. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed the first open standard personal computer (IBM PC launched in US markets in 1981; the first deliveries to European markets were in 1982 and 1983), which standardized the software development. For the first time in history, the general public had personal computers. These computers used similar operating systems that allowed their users to communicate by using the same platform.
Soon after, the general public saw the start of what is now known as the current information technology era: personal computers in the public\'s homes, using communication devices known as modems, to access information on remote servers. The first incarnation of those were BBS servers, setup by education facilities or even individual people, to store both information and allow discussion with chat and messages.
The Internet was originally conceived as a distributed, fail-proof network that could connect computers together and be resistant to any point of failure. It was created mainly by DARPA; its initial software applications were email and computer file transfer.
It was with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 that the Internet really took off as a global network. Today the Internet has become the ultimate place to accelerate the flow of relevant information and the fastest growing form of media. Lallana, Emmanuel C., and Margaret N. Uy, "The Information Age".
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of
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