The U.S. Information Technology Industry 1940-2000 Summary All segments that comprise the information technology industry (computers, telecommunications, and software and services) have played a major role in the transformation of the U.S. economy. The computer was commercially introduced in the late 1940s and has shown the fastest rate of advance of any technology in the twentieth century. Communication technologies made large strides in the last three decades improving telephone networks with better voice quality, higher data speeds, and faster call setup times. Software, computer programming, emerged from punched cards and tape to FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC and fourth generation languages (4GL).

For the first few decades the United States