ABSTRACT
There have been significant advances in the development and application of information technology (IT) over the past decade. Computers have moved from mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s to personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. This was accompanied by a rapid development of networks (local area networks and wide area networks) which facilitated the transfer and exchange of information between personal computers within an organisation and among organisations. The emergence of the Internet in the 1990s added another significant dimension to the IT industry. This global network is facilitated by significant advances in communication protocols and standards along with the establishment of enormous optical cable networks. This started with the telephone as a medium for transferring and exchanging information between computers to broadband networks using optical fibres. Such a development, in the hardware and networks, had a great influence on the speed of processing information not only within a single computer but also on the speed of transferring information from one computer to another through optical and wireless networks.
