This capacity made it possible for computers to handle requests from hundreds of users simultaneously, often giving the impression that each one had the computer’s complete attention. Such interactions with the computer typically involved computer terminals-devices that either printed information on paper or displayed their operations on video monitors. The terminals, however, were not themselves computers but devices for interacting with the central computer that actually did the work.
Today, you’re most likely familiar with the next step beyond time sharing. Some network are local, connecting computers in a single facility or organization ( an office a classroom, a university, a corporation). Access to these network is restricted to authorized uses. In the past couple of decades, however, networking-and time sharing-have gone global via the international networks known collectively as the Internet and the World Wide Web. You and your colleagues share access to an Internet “server” at your campus, and that server talks to seemingly direct contact with anyone connected to any of those other servers. Although this development is revolutionizing communication, it is still a matter of entering, storing, processing, and sharing machine-readable information. The current revision of this textbook, for example, involved countless electronic communications with colleagues around the world. Research and teaching examples were found in electronic forums. Portions of the manuscript were sent electronically for review and comment. Appendix B examines the evolving world of cyberspace in more detail.
Computer network vastly augment the resources available to researchers. For example, they make it possible for a researcher sitting at home in California to get a copy of a data set maintained on a computer in London and to analyze those data using a program maintained on a computer in Texas. The results of the analysis would be returned to the user in California, and the results could also be stored for examination by a colleague in Russia. Procedures like this are becoming commonplace; before the end of your career, you’ll look back on them as primitive.
The development that put all this power in the hands of individual researchers was the invention of the personal computer or PC (originally called the “microcomputer” to distinguish it from mainframes and their descendents, minicomputers). The PC revolution has progresses so rapidly that it’s easy to lose sight of how much things have changed in a relatively short time. When I was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1960s, the Survey Research