|
Computers have been used to coordinate information in multiple
locations since the 1950s, with the U.S. military's SAGE system
the first large-scale example of such a system, which led to a
number of special-purpose commercial systems like Sabre.
In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions
throughout the United States began to link their computers
together using telecommunications technology. This effort was
funded by ARPA (now DARPA), and the computer network that it
produced was called the ARPANET. The technologies that made the
Arpanet possible spread and evolved. In time, the network spread
beyond academic and military institutions and became known as
the Internet. The emergence of networking involved a
redefinition of the nature and boundaries of the computer.
Computer operating systems and applications were modified to
include the ability to define and access the resources of other
computers on the network, such as peripheral devices, stored
information, and the like, as extensions of the resources of an
individual computer. Initially these facilities were available
primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in
the 1990s the spread of applications like e-mail and the World
Wide Web, combined with the development of cheap, fast
networking technologies like Ethernet and ADSL saw computer
networking become almost ubiquitous. In fact, the number of
computers that are networked is growing phenomenally. A very
large proportion of personal computers regularly connect to the
Internet to communicate and receive information. "Wireless"
networking, often utilizing mobile phone networks, has meant
networking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous even in mobile
computing environments.
A fax (short for facsimile and sometimes called faxes telecopying) is the telephonic transmission of scanned-in printed material (text or images), usually to a telephone number associated with a printer or other output device. |