Abstract :
By the late 1970\´s most american businesses, Iarge and midsize, had become acutely dependent on both telephone and computer usage. For several decades, business had grown accustomed to the use of AT&T\´s telephone network for more and more of its communications needs. By then, IBM\´s mainframe computing had proven its value in efficiently handling the financial and accounting needs of the larger businesses. DEC and other minicomputer vendors had by this time also made significant inroads in offering such computing capabilities to smaller businesses with their minicomputer products. Against this backdrop and forced by various competitive pressures, deregulation and the breakup of the "Bell System" premises wiring systems have become one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the Information Age. To gain a perspective on how such an invisible product could become such a market force, one needs to examine the telephone and computing systems and how they evolved through this period.
