542 Making Key Strategic Decisions
The Internet works on a set of software standards the first of which,
TCP/IP, was developed in the 1970s. The entire theory behind the Internet
and TCP/IP, which enables computers to speak to each other over the Inter-
net, was to create a network that had no central controller. The Internet is un-
like a string of Christmas lights, where if one light in the series goes out the
rest of the lights stop functioning. Rather, if one computer in the network is
disabled, the rest of the network continues to perform.
Each computer in the Internet has an Internet, or IP, address. Similar to
one’s postal address, it consists of a series of numbers (e.g., 155.48.178.21),
and it tells the network where to leave your e-mail, and data. When you ac-
cess an Internet site through its URL (e.g., http://www.babson.edu),,) a series of
computers on the Internet, called domain name servers (DNS), convert the
URL to an IP address. When an e-mail, message, or data is sent to someone
over the Internet, it is broken into a series of packets. These packets, similar
to postcards, contain the IP address of the sender, the IP address of the
recipient, the packet number of the message (e.g., 12 of 36), and the data
itself. These packets may travel many different routes along the Internet.
Frequently, packets belonging to the same message do not travel the same
route. The receiving computer then reassembles these packets into a com-
plete message.
The second standard that makes the Internet work is HTML, or Hyper-
text Markup Language. This language allows data to be displayed on the
user ’s screen. It also allows a user to click on an Internet link and jump to a
new page on the Internet. While HTML remains the underlying program-
ming language for the World Wide Web, there are many more user-friendly
software packages, like FrontPage 2000, that help create HTML code. More-
over, HTML, while powerful in its own right, is not dynamic and has its lim-
itations. Therefore, languages such as JavaScript, Java, and Pearl, which create
animation, perform calculations, create dynamic Web pages, and access and
update databases with information on the host’s Web server, were developed
to complement HTML. Using a Web browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator or
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), the computer converts the HTML or other
programming languages into the information that the users see on their com-
puter monitors.
Internet technology has radically changed the manner in which corporate
information systems process their data. In the early and mid-1990s, corporate in-
formation systems used distributed processing techniques. Using this method,
some of the processing would take place on the central computer (the server)
and the rest on the users’ (the clients’) computers—hence, the term client-
server computing.Many companies implemented applications using this technol-
ogy, which ensured that processing power was utilized at both ends and that
systems were scalable. The problem with client-server processing was that dif-
ferent computers (even within the IBM-compatible PC family) used different
drivers and required tweaking to make the systems work properly. Also, if the
software needed to be changed at the client end, and there were many clients