COMPUTERS
Computers have been used to coordinate information in multiple locations since
the 1950s. The U.S. military's SAGE system was the first large-scale example
of such a system, which led to a number of special-purpose commercial systems
like Sabre.In the
1970s, computer engineers at research institutions throughout the United States
began to link their computers together using telecommunications technology.
This effort was funded by ARPA (now DARPA), and the computer network that it
produced was called the ARPANET. The technologies that made the Arpanet possible
spread and evolved. In time, the network spread beyond academic and military
institutions and became known as the Internet.
The emergence of networking involved a redefinition of the nature and boundaries
of the computer. Computer operating systems and applications were modified to
include the ability to define and access the resources of other computers on
the network, such as peripheral devices, stored information, and the like, as
extensions of the resources of an individual computer. Initially these facilities
were available primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in
the 1990s the spread of applications like e-mail and the World Wide Web, combined
with the development of cheap, fast networking technologies like Ethernet and
ADSL saw computer networking become almost ubiquitous. In fact, the number of
computers that are networked is growing phenomenally. A very large proportion
of personal computers regularly connect to the Internet to communicate and receive
information. "Wireless" networking, often utilizing mobile phone networks,
has meant networking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous even in mobile computing
environments.(1)
(1)
Source : Wikipedia