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booking and ticketing transactions to an airline's reservation system,
billing for utility services.
An early comment (by an IBM big-brain) was that five computers would meet all the needs!
== History ==
In the UK, the first commercial business computer was developed by English Electric for Lyons (a catering organisation). This was 'Lyons Electonic Office' - LEO. It was developed further and used widely during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Early commercial systems were installed exclusively by large organisations. These could afford to invest the time and capital necessary to purchase hardware, hire specialist staff to develop bespoke software and work through the consequent (and often unexpected) organisational and cultural changes.
At first, individual organisations developed their own software, including data management utilities, themselves. Different products might also have 'one-off' bespoke software. This fragmented approach lead to duplicated effort and the production of management information needed manual effort.
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Results would be presented to users on paper. Enquiries were delayed by whatever turn round was available.
== Today ==
As with other industrial processes commercial IT has moved in all respects from a bespoke, craft-based industry where the product was tailored to fit the customer; to multi-use components taken off the shelf to find the best-fit in any situation. Mass-production has greatly reduced costs and IT is available to the smallest company or one-man band - or school-kid.
LEO was hardware tailored for a single client. Today, pentium or AMD chips are standard and become parts of other components which are combined as needed. One individual change of note was the freeing of computers and removable storage from protected, air-filtered environments. Microsoft and IBM at various times have been influential enough to impose order on IT and the resultant standardisations allowed specialist software to flourish.
Software is available off the shelf: apart from Microsoft products such as Office, or Lotus, or whatever, there are specialist packages for payroll and personnel management, account maintenance and customer management, to name a few. These are highly specialised and intricate components of larger environments, but they rely upon common conventions and interfaces.
Data storage has also standardised. Relational databases are developed by different suppliers to common formats and conventions. Common PDF formats can be shared by large main-frames and desk-top personal computers, allowing online, realtime input and validation.
In parallel, software development has fragmented. There are still specialist technicians, but these increasingly use standardised methodologies where outcomes are predictable and accessible. At the other end of the scale, any office manager can dabble in spreadsheets or databases and obtain acceptable results (but there are risks).
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