The Digital Hand, Volume 2 is an historical survey of how computers and telecommunications have been deployed in over a dozen industries in the financial, telecommunications, media, and entertainment sectors over the past half century. It is part of a sweeping three-volume description of how management in some forty industries embraced the computer and changed the American economy.
The Digital Hand, Volume 2, is a historical survey of how computers and telecommunications have been deployed in over a dozen industries in the financial, telecommunications, media and entertainment sectors over the past half century. It is past of a sweeping three-volume description of how
management in some forty industries embraced the computer and changed the American economy. Computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in America. However it is difficult to grasp the full extent of these changes and their implications for the future of business. To begin the long
process of understanding the effects of computing in American business, we need to know the history of how computers were first used, by whom and why. In this, the second volume of The Digital Hand, James W. Cortada combines detailed analysis with narrative history to provide a broad overview of
computing's and telecomunications' role in over a dozen industries, ranging from Old Economy sectors like finance and publishing to New Economy sectors like digital photography and video games. He also devotes considerable attention to the rapidly changing media and entertainment industries which
are now some of the most technologically advanced in the American economy. Beginning in 1950, when commercial applications of digital technology began to appear, Cortada examines the ways different industries adopted new technologies, as well as the ways their innovative applications influenced
other industries and the US economy as a whole. He builds on the surveys presented in the first volume of the series, which examined sixteen manufacturing, process, transportation, wholesale and retail industries. Inaddition to this account, of computers' impact on industries, Cortada also
demonstrates how industries themselves influenced the nature of digital technology. Managers, historians and others interested in the history of modern business will appreciate this historical analysis
Cortada is one of the premier-and most prolific-of computer historians and covers nooks and crannies that many others miss. Given the present centrality of computers in virtually everything, Cortada is becoming the recorder of a very important transformation in American (and most world) business.
