The 1980s — the birth
The 1980s: the era of yuppies. PCs, PCs, and more PCs suddenly appeared everywhere you looked — as well as more and more minicomputers (and even a few Macintoshes). Before anyone knew it, “real computer applica- tions” were no longer only on mainframes; they were all over the place — everywhere you looked in an organization. The problem called islands of data was beginning to look ominous: How could an organization hope to compete if its data was scattered all over the place on different computer systems that weren’t even all under the control of the centralized data- processing department? (Never mind that even when the data was all stored on mainframes, it was still isolated in different files and databases, so it was just as inaccessible.)