1. INTRODUCTION
Information technology is one of the disciplines that have
rapidly passed from the strictly scientific plane to the everyday world.
Increasingly, man incorporates into his daily life a series of instruments of
an electronic nature that have as a reference the collection, processing or use
of data, in his vital field.
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The best known of these equipment is the computer and its
peripheral elements such as printers, mouse, stylus, digitizing tables,
visiocascos, scanners, among others.
The computer can also be considered as the physical
representation of technological change. It favors its development and promotes
with it, a great variety of processes. This is the central theme to be
addressed in this article, in order to consider what have been the great
changes that have allowed the computer to become the heroine and maximum
representative of technological change in modern organizations?
To answer this question it is necessary to locate some
structural elements that have allowed the consolidation of what the French
philosopher Buadrillard (1969: 131-134) could call "modern gossip":
the computer.
This work is addressed to the general public and is divided
into 8 sections: 1. Miniaturization; 2. Switching from host-based systems to
network-based systems; 3. The change from standards of supplier-owner nature to
open standards software; 4. The change from individual to multimedia: data,
text, voice and image; 5. The change from account control to the
supplier-client computer based on self-determination; 6. The change in software
development: from art to craft; 7. The change of the alphanumeric interface to
the graphical and multiform interface; and 8. The move from isolated
applications to integrated software applications.
1. Miniaturization
The reduction of electronic components, also known as
nanotechnology, (Drexler, 1993: 20-25) close to the dimensions corresponding to
10-9 or 10-13 is an element that has allowed the computer to concretize its
diffusion process. The fundamental objective of this process is to increase its
portability, its autonomy, in short its mobility, commutability and
opportunity. As a result it seeks its forced adaptation to the space and time
needs of modern life.
It is pertinent to remember that if a discovery or
innovation is not spread are doomed to failure, by not allowing its marketers wide
margins of profitability in a short time.
The manufacturing process of computers has passed with
dizzying speed of the systems operated with vacuum valves (known as bulbs or
vacuum ampoules); to traditional semiconductors (known as PNP or NPN type transistors);
from there to the systems created based on integrated circuits and finally to
the microprocessors that carry out processes in parallel way.
Since the 1960s, it was the decade in which the first
integrated circuits were created; the number of electronic components housed in
the "chips" has almost doubled annually - as an average -. Although
the border in this technological area can not be located here. The emergence of
new materials and technologies allow the development of computers that operate
with small electrical or electrochemical impulses or simply with water.
