Abstract
This chapter proposes a business-oriented definition of the term “digital” which we will be used throughout this book. We also consider the history behind the main waves of digital technology, from 1940 to 2020, to help contextualize how we arrived at our current situation so quickly and to hint at where the current pace of development could take us in just a few more decades. Finally, we highlight how digital technologies are becoming so finely ingrained into the physical world that it will soon make no sense to separate the “physical world” and the “virtual world”.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A term that refers to the “digital literati”: organizations or individuals that are well versed in digital matters (technologies, business models, etc.).
- 2.
1.8 billion Internet-connected people (>25% of global population) by December 2009 according to https://internetworldstats.com/ [accessed 26/10/2019].
- 3.
As a bit of trivia, data created and copied annually is estimated to reach 44 zettabytes in 2020, about the same as the total number of grains of sand on the earth’s beaches. Source: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/master-the-wave-of-data-for-competitive-advantage/ [accessed 26/10/2019].
References
Andreessen, M. (2011). Why software is eating the world. The Wall Street Journal, 20/08/2011. Source https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. Accessed October 26, 2019.
de la Merced, M. (2010). Blockbuster, hoping to reinvent itself, files for bankruptcy. The New York Times, 20/09/2010. Source https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/business/24blockbuster.html. Accessed October 26, 2019.
Dean, J., & Ghemawat, S. (2004). MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters. In Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation. San Francisco, CA: OSDI’04, pp. 137–150. Source https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub62. Accessed October 26, 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tardieu, H., Daly, D., Esteban-Lauzán, J., Hall, J., Miller, G. (2020). The Birth of Digital—A Brief History of Digital Technologies. In: Deliberately Digital. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37955-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37955-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37954-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37955-1
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)