The technology has been an indispensable tool for the advancement of humanity. Particularly in the last century with the onset of the industrial era, and now, in our century with the invention of the automobile, the airplane and the computer, the world economy is inconceivable without the support and technology. In the modern economy, the technological factor is the one advocating for change and the most significant cost reduction.
We shall discuss this aspect of technology that we believe the greatest impact in the global economy. This is the information technology and in particular the explosive development of communications networks and their commercial uses.
Although the concept of communication networks appeared in academic circles around the seventies, and who for over twenty years these networks have been used successfully throughout the global scientific community via the Internet, its use was in field specialists. Not until 1992, with the appearance of “WWW” (World Wide Web), a new tool that integrates and greatly facilitates the use of network services, that growth in Internet use becomes explosive.
The “WWW” is an integrated information service in a friendly and graphically, allows navigation through pages, or units of multimedia information (text, image, video and voice), installed in the various computers that make the Internet.
The trend towards the use of networks and the ability to send messages by electronic means in just moments, it tends to integrate existing services with mail, phone, fax and television, as one can, in real time, communicate with another person , and send voice and image, and even accompany documents. Newspapers are already on the Internet and is not far distant day when one can schedule your TV and its own news through the network.
The most widely used service on networks today is email, which allows the exchange of voice, images and text almost instantly, depending on the speed of the media involved in the network. The email service is also used as the internal working mechanism of the companies within their Intranets, or closed networks under the same Internet communication protocols, and its use brings significant savings on long distance companies distributed geographically. It is also an excellent tool for the organization of work, coordination of meetings and events, and group discussions.
Another important service is the network file transfer, known as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), whereby it is possible within the network to exchange any type of document you are in an electronic environment. This application facilitates the ebb and flow of changes to a document from a group of users of a company, consortium or economic group.
Perhaps the least used service by the public, but not least, is the remote connection, TELNET. This service enables remote access from a computer to any other connected to the network, if the user has the necessary permit to work in the second. If permissions exist, a person can be connected from a personal computer at home, a supercomputer installed at a million miles away. The process gives the personal computer as if it were a remote terminal supercomputer. This service has a huge interest in a company or workgroup, allowing specialized computing infrastructure sharing among different agencies or branches distant from the same institution.
These new technologies bring with them new ideas on the use of the network and the potential implicit in exchanging information. To take just some examples of what can be new applications, some of which are now a reality and some exist in research laboratories, but are not yet available to the public.
For example, consider the possibility of a mobile society where, from a train, plane, or home, you can trade via networks of information, consult the inventory in an office, issue an order to the supplier and order the bank is made a transfer of money. The supplier in turn may have a computer in the truck and to be dynamically changing routes and delivery routes, according to traffic conditions or last-minute changes requested by the client. These applications are possible thanks to the network, to mobile phones and systematic work around the definition of standards for the electronic transfer of documents.
The electronic document processing has become a necessity in almost all businesses to communicate both internally and to interact with other companies. The electronic exchange of documents allows the transmission of data in structured formats between applications on different computers. This form of exchange of information greatly reduces the transaction time, errors of transcription and the production and management of paper can keep lower inventories online and guarantee the quality of the information provided and the response time to customers. There is a major global effort to generate standards for the electronic exchange of documents is being adopted in almost all countries.
Electronic commerce is one of the latest Internet applications and more growth. Production of documents, inventories and catalogs online is cheaper than printing on paper and can always be current. On the other hand, the potential number of readers is very large and tends to increase exponentially with the growth of the network. This has led many companies are entering the Internet market, especially the provision of services such as travel agents, financial agents or real estate they need to provide its customers dynamic and updated information and graphical evaluation and comparative analysis .
Another interesting example is the interactive manufacturing. Manufacturing has gone global and for many years often find that we have in a factory, assembly and design another in another. Through the computer network, several individuals working in the design of one piece of a car may be interacting in real-time network. For example, someone may propose to design a car part on the network and the person working in the assembly may be doing observations of change, while the corporate staff may be evaluating the costs of such change.
The development of new applications using networks is being strongly supported worldwide. Many projects are funded to develop: digital libraries that make their assets public domain literature, iconographic, sound, etc., And virtual labs that put multiple network service specialized equipment to allow researchers from a group or of an institution, geographically dispersed, work together in real time through the network.
The need for technological advances in the areas of hardware and software are already in sight. Every day new problems to solve related to the use of the network. The concept of individual computer, both physical and logical, is being replaced by the computer as a set of processors networked and distributed systems. Thus the concept of system is changing at all levels by the concept of distributed system. For example, research on databases has shifted to research in distributed databases with multimedia objects, voice, image, text and video, and expert systems are no longer isolated systems to become cooperative and distributed systems, using intelligent agents within the network to communicate.
The construction of tools for browsing networks, search engines and data classification, encryption algorithms and graphical interfaces, intelligent, have assumed an enormous importance on the computer.
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