IT Systems Management, Second Edition

Appendix E. Historical Perspective

Winston Churchill once said that the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. This can apply to any field of endeavor and implies that the vision ahead of us is sometimes brought into clearer focus by first looking back over from where we came. This appendix presents an historical perspective of information technology (IT) during its infancy in the middle of the 20^th century. My intent here is to present some of the key attributes which characterized IT environments of that time and to show how these attributes contributed to the early development of systems management.

I begin by describing a timeline from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, highlighting key ...