Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Part 2—Software: Putting It All Together

It's difficult to synthesize such a complex subject as software, but the challenge of supporting e-commerce provides an excellent vehicle for describing how the pieces go together. To close this section, and to prepare you for the next one on networks, the e-commerce example is extremely useful.

Choosing an OS for E-commerce

As noted in the closing section of Part 1, in e-commerce, a request for information enters a computer over a network connection, is passed over the I/O bus to the CPU, and from there goes to software that serves Web pages, and most likely after that to a database system that locates the item or items to be sold, or service to be provided, or whatever. There's more, but let's back up ...