This compact history traces the computer industry from its origins in 1950s mainframes, through the establishment of standards beginning in 1965 and the introduction of personal computing in the 1980s. It concludes with the Internet’s explosive growth since 1995. Across these four periods, Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel Garcia-Swartz describe the steady trend toward miniaturization and explain its consequences for the bundles of interacting components that make up a computer system. With miniaturization, the price of computation fell and entry into the industry became less costly. Companies supplying different components learned to cooperate even as they competed with other businesses for market share. Simultaneously with miniaturization—and equally consequential—the core of the computer industry shifted from hardware to software and services. Companies that failed to adapt to this trend were left behind. Governments did not turn a blind eye to the activities of entrepreneurs. The U.S. government was the major customer for computers in the early years. Several European governments subsidized private corporations, and Japan fostered R&D in private firms while protecting its domestic market from foreign competition. From Mainframes to Smartphones is international in scope and broad in its purview of this revolutionary industry.

In this IBM® Redbooks® publication we demonstrate that it is possible to combine the traditional strengths of the mainframe to manage large volumes of data and run business transactions with the Web 2.0 paradigm. We can get simpler interfaces, better integration among different services, lightweight protocols for communication, and much more, together with the availability, security, and reliability of mainframe data. And we will show how mainframe data can be accessed by smartphones such as Android or iPhone. But we can do more to demonstrate how flexible the mainframe platform is. Through the use of pervasive devices it is possible to add new possibilities to mainframe applications, extending System z® capabilities. We can receive notifications in real time, for example, of successful or unsuccessful termination of a TWS job stream, or we can immediately get alerts about abends that occurred in a critical application. This book is another demonstration that the mainframe is alive and kicking and can and should play a key role in modern application architectures.

Most introductory books about computers are long, detailed technical books such as those used in a computer science course or else tutorials that provide instructions on how to operate a computer with little description of what happens inside the machine. This book fits in the large gap between these two extremes. It is for people who would like to understand how computers work, without having to learn a lot of technical details. Only the most important things about computers are covered. There is no math except some simple arithmetic. The only prerequisite is knowing how to use a web browser. As an alternative or adjunct to reading the book, you can watch a series of short videos by going to youtube.com and searching for “Understanding Computers, Smartphones and the Internet”. Only current day technology is covered. People who are interested in learning about how computers evolved from the earliest machines can read the companion book “A Concise History of Computers, Smartphones and the Internet”. While originally intended for people who are not in the computer field, this book is also useful for those taking a coding course or an introductory computer science course. Even people already in the computer field will find things of interest in this book.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the rapidly changing world of Web-based business technologies and their often-disruptive innovations. The history of the Web is a short one. Indeed many college graduates today were not even born when the Web first emerged. It is therefore an opportune time to view the Web as having reached the point of graduation. The Web has led to new ways in which businesses connect and operate, and how individuals communicate and socialize; related technologies include cloud computing, social commerce, crowd sourcing, and the Internet of Things, to name but a few. These developments, including their technological foundations and business impacts, are at the heart of the book. It contextualizes these topics by providing a brief history of the World Wide Web, both in terms of the technological evolution and its resultant business impacts. The book was written for a broad audience, including technology managers and students in higher education. It is also intended as a guide for people who grew up with a background in business administration or engineering or a related area but who, in the course of their career paths, have reached a point where IT-related decisions have become their daily business, e.g., in digital transformation. The book describes the most important Web technologies and related business applications, and especially focuses on the business implications of these technologies. As such, it offers a solid technology- and business-focused view on the impact of the Web, and balances rules and approaches for strategy development and decision making with a certain technical understanding of what goes on “behind the scenes.”

The rich, untold origin story of the ubiquitous web cookie—what’s wrong with it, why it’s being retired, and how we can do better. Consent pop-ups continually ask us to download cookies to our computers, but is this all-too-familiar form of privacy protection effective? No, Meg Leta Jones explains in The Character of Consent, rather than promote functionality, privacy, and decentralization, cookie technology has instead made the internet invasive, limited, and clunky. Good thing, then, that the cookie is set for retirement in 2024. In this eye-opening book, Jones tells the little-known story of this broken consent arrangement, tracing it back to the major transnational conflicts around digital consent over the last twenty-five years. What she finds is that the policy controversy is not, in fact, an information crisis—it’s an identity crisis. Instead of asking how people consent, Jones asks who exactly is consenting and to what. Packed into those cookie pop-ups, she explains, are three distinct areas of law with three different characters who can consent. Within (mainly European) data protection law, the data subject consents. Within communication privacy law, the user consents. And within consumer protection law, the privacy consumer consents. These areas of law have very different histories, motivations, institutional structures, expertise, and strategies, so consent—and the characters who can consent—plays a unique role in those areas of law. The Character of Consent gives each computer character its due, taking us back to their origin stories within the legal history of computing. By doing so, Jones provides alternative ways of understanding the core issues within the consent dilemma. More importantly, she offers bold new approaches to creating and adopting better tech policies in the future.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 27th Argentine Congress on Computer Science, CACIC 2021, held in Salta, Argentina in October 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held in a virtual mode. The 18 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 130 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: intelligent agents and systems; distributed and parallel processing; computer technology applied to education; graphic computation, images and visualization; software engineering; databases and data mining; hardware architectures, networks, and operating systems; innovation in software systems; signal processing and real-time systems; computer security; and digital governance and smart cities.