FREE online courses on Information Technology - Chapter 9 INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURES - The PC Is Totally Different
When the personal computer first arrived, users treated it as
a computer that belonged to them. Much of the early motivation for using PCs was
to get away from the traditional information services (IS) department. The IS
department has the reputation of being unresponsive and slow to develop
applications. With his or her own computer, the user could become independent of
IS.
At first there was hardly any software for PCs. But,
entrepreneurs soon saw tremendous opportunities in the eventual market of
millions of computers with each owner buying the right package. Of course, the
package for the PC had to be a lot different from the package for the miniframe
or mini. First, a user not a technology professional, would evaluate the use the
PC package. The program had to be easy to sue with a pleasant interface, giving
rise to the term user friendly, as opposed to user surly in-house custom
systems. The packages had to be easy to use because the vendor could not afford
to provide training for a package that cost less than $500.
Users controlled the first PCs and generally entered their
own data for analysis. The most popular uses of PCs and generally entered their
own data for analysis, presentation graphics and database management, though the
number of applications packages continues to expand rapidly. User control not
only frees the user from dependence on the system staff, it also provides
extensive discretion of what program runs at what time on a computer. Since the
computer is not shared, the user can choose when and what to run and has
unheard- of freedom.
