ABSTRACT
Information technology, in the broadest use of the term, pre-dates the computer and has been linked with management consulting for a large part of the twentieth century in some form or another. The office environment represents one of the main avenues for the employment of information technology. Taking the computer as a device rather than as a function, in the period prior to the appearance of the first electronic computer, analogue machines were designed and used to model scientific and engineering problems where mathematical calculations were either difficult to carry out or were time-consuming in the extreme. Early computer programmes were a product of the 1950s and a number of computer languages were developed during the decade. The 1960s witnessed the arrival of the minicomputer at a fraction of the cost of mainframe units, thus removing some of the financial arguments sustaining the justification of time-sharing.
