ABSTRACT
The opening decade of the twenty-first century coincided with the immediate aftermath of a major technology-based investment boom and prosperity: the information technology (IT) revolution. Revolutionary technological change grows from invention that ultimately brings large-scale obsolescence across wide spectra of industry. Technological revolutions are relatively infrequent; there were only three such events in all of the twentieth century. The first spanned the years from about 1910 to 1923 and grew from the electrification of the economy and the growth of the automobile and supporting industries. The second was from 1955 to about 1970, in which a number of new technologies spread throughout the economy. The third was the IT revolution of the 1990s. More importantly, however, this was the decade in which the IT revolution was forming after decades of innovation of its basic components, and it was the investment in IT technology that brought the IT revolution to the wide economy in the form of a growth-spawning investment boom.
