The Evolution of e.Business: Can Technology Supply Meet the Full Business Demand?

The Early History Of E.Business

I first became involved with e.business around 1970 when my company, Rowntree Mackintosh of York, UK (confectionery and food), was examining ways to reduce the costs and to improve the accuracy of invoicing customers, and thereby to improve the speed of payment. We considered the use of magnetic tapes delivered via couriers, but there was not a widely used standard for such tapes at that time, nor an agreed standard for most paper, let alone electronic, invoices. Thus, Supply could not meet Demand.

Nine track phase encoded magnetic tape had started to become more widely used, but there were many different and incompatible electronic media (tapes, cassettes, disks etc) either being re-developed, or becoming short-lived. Even within companies, point-to-point electronic communication was difficult, despite them being all ‘IBM Blue’ or devoted uniquely to another computer supplier.