ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1977, Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, Star Wars hit the big screen, and Apple Computer, Inc. introduced the world to the first personal computer. Four years later, Ronald Reagan was president, Prince Charles and Lady Diana married, and IBM began selling its IBM PC. From that beginning, computing power started moving from the mainframe to the desktop. Soon thereafter, spreadsheets and word processing applications began their journey to replace clipboards and typewriters. By 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union, New Coke hit the shelves, and data was going everywhere. Even inside the mainframe computers, data was finding its own home. Supervisors, managers, and executives alike were no longer able to look at a single clipboard to find out how the business was performing. The data was hopelessly entrenched in applications and nooks and crannies that would never again see the light of day. Such was the origin of Decision Support Systems.
