ABSTRACT
Three major waves of technology have influenced the way we worked and, to a significant extent, the way we lived, during the last 50 years. The first came in the 1950s with computers and high-compression engines, the second in the 1970s with microprocessors (see the next section) and distributed information systems, the third in the 1990s with any-to-any telecommunications networks, through the Internet and wide-area broadband solutions.
