ABSTRACT
The computing industry itself has grown dramatically since the 1940s and was initially dominated by technology which provided large number-crunching and data-processing solutions within major commercial organisations or university research departments. The evolution of the technology progressed through a phase of lesser machines called mini-computers in the 1960s and 1970s, which both economically and physically facilitated functions such as industrial control and smaller commercial administrative operations, and were within the budgets of academic research projects. Thanks largely to the development of the single microprocessor chip, today we have desktop computers on practically every desk in every office and, through the merger of the computer and communications industries, a worldwide interconnection of computers.
