The Age of Participation and Collaborative Value Creation
The development of computing has rolled out in five major waves.1 The first one came in the
1960s, as mainframe computers advanced into the corporate world and became essential
business tools. The 1970s saw the wide adoption of the minicomputer. This signifies the second
wave. Then the personal computer came in the 1980s, as the symbol of the third wave, followed in 1990s by networking and the internet, and the spread of distributed computing, as the symbol
of the fourth wave.