Industrial Revolution vs Computer Revolution

Introduction

Like previous economic revolutions, the Computer Revolution is marked most noticeably by a series of technological breakthroughs. In this case, the developments in electronics and computer technologies, along with dramatic changes in telecommunications, provided the basis for economic change (Goloboy & Mancall, pp 100 - 109). With the vastly enhanced powers of memory, calculation, and control placed in a microscopic chip, computers were poised to assume a central role in economic life.

Discussion

The new forms of technology aimed at changing work processes and organizational conditions. With this radical change has outpaced the Fordist form of production for a higher production rate based on automation, the joint use of computers, information networks and teamwork. This new method raises the productivity of labor, flexible means of production, making improvements to the quality system, lowers costs, accelerates circulation times, enables decentralization and relocation of production processes to suit the national and regional comparative advantages of each country. In comparison, the Computer Revolution presents something of a paradox. At the same time, however, despite the geographical dispersion of production and the more nuanced worker relationships, information systems give top management greater direct control over the production process (Goloboy & Mancall, pp 100 - 109).

In the early eighteenth century fabrics that are manufactured in Europe had the silk feedstock (a luxury item because of its price), wool or linen. None of them could compete with cotton fabrics from India and known as calico or muslin it. By then, the production of cotton in England was insignificant and its import from India was a major departure from its commercial balance. To compete with Eastern production needed a fine yarn spinners and stronger than the British did not produce. The first innovation was spinning out of these concerns: Hargreaves, a spinner, built the first working instrument, the spinning-jenny (1763), which mechanically reproduced movements when using a spinning wheel spinner while he could work multiple spindles. The thin but fragile thread that obtained it limited its application to the web of tissue which remained the linen warp. Therefore continued the manufacture of linen and productivity received new impetus due to the limited requirements of the jenny in space and energy.

The Industrial Revolution is a historical period between the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which England first and the rest of continental Europe then suffer the largest set of socioeconomic, technological and cultural history of mankind since the Neolithic. These new forms of technology aimed at changing work processes and organizational conditions. With this radical change has outpaced the Fordist form of production for a higher production rate based on automation, the joint use of computers, information networks and teamwork. This new method raises the productivity of labor, flexible means of production, making improvements to the quality system, lowers costs, accelerates circulation times, enables decentralization and relocation of production processes to suit the national and regional comparative advantages of each country. Moreover it is of vital importance in shaping the ...