Managing Information Systems :: essays research papers fc

Communication, some say, separate us from animals. But not just communication, being able to communicate ideas and concepts and in turn make them into reality. For years businesses have had to distribute written memos and other paperwork to their fellow employees in order to spread their ideas. In the changing world that we live in today this concept of spreading ideas is slowly fading. Communication is spread throughout the globe in a matter of minutes through the use of computers and modern technology. We can communicate over thousands of miles or just a couple of floors with only the click of a button. But with this new found way of communicating comes the confusion of what to do with all this information, how best to utilize it, and how to regulate it. This paper will look into those questions and what actually makes up this new virtual world that we are creating for ourselves called cyberspace. In the 1950’s and 60’s the fear of nuclear attack was constantly on the minds of the American people and the government. The government therefore developed a corporation called RAND that they put in charge of making a network that could be protected from nuclear attack and could guarantee that we could still fire our own nuclear missiles in our defense. Soon major schools and corporations threw their hats into the race for a network in which information could be sent electronically. Throughout the seventies a couple of schools developed their own network in which they could communicate with each other and devices were designed to make networks within offices possible using a technology called Ethernet. Throughout the eighties the newly designed internet was mainly used by science foundations, colleges, and the government as they worked together with growing computer and telephone companies to help advance the technology. It wasn’t until the early nineties when the I nternet started to look the way it does now, with the first Internet society and the founding of the World Wide Web in 1991. Since then the Internet has been growing, getting faster, and finding its way into more and more peoples lives every day. Over 2.7 trillion e-mail messages alone were sent in 1997 (Nickels,Mchugh 508). Keeping that in mind it is easy to see why we need managers in order to keep this information from cluttering up systems and getting lost in the hectic world today.