Supply chains in the cloud (part I): History, context and perspective

Most of us who are less than 50 years old today associate the early rise of the graphical Internet age (think Netscape) with the origins of near ubiquitous desktop computing in the office and eventually, two decades later, ubiquitous networked and collaborative business productivity tools — not to mention the adoption of procurement and supply chain technologies that are finally delivering on their promised ROI more frequently than not, which was not the case a decade ago. Yet the story of workplace computing goes back much longer, to a very different time and place.