Modern communications and e-commerce
Connecting many computer networks and using common addressing system, the Internet has been growing rapidly since its creation in 1983, radio, telephone anв cable television wires, satellites being used to deliver Internet services.
By the mid-1990s the Internet linked millions of computers throughout the world and it is sure to be the most important commercial and popular means of communication nowadays.
The original uses of the Internet were electronic mail, file transfer, bulletin boards and remote computer access. Having expanded considerable during the 1990s, the World Wide Web enabled users easily to examine the Internet sites and now it is likely to have become the leading informational service of the Internet.
The first electronic transactions are supposed to have handled in the 1950s due to telex, radio-teletype and telephone. In the following decades various industries elaborated upon the system of electronic data interchange before a simple and independent of any particular machine standard was created.
Since the mid-1990s electronic commerce has become one of the most rapidly growing retail sectors involving the use of computer telecommunication networks for maintaining business relationship and selling information, services and commodities.
Although e-commerce usually refers only to the trading of goods and services over the Internet, it actually includes broader economic activity such as business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce as well as internet organizational transactions that support these activities.
A large part of e-commerce was transferred to the Internet after the first graphical “browser” software for the access to the World Wide Web had been introduced in 1993 and when the number of companies and innodividuals using “on-line” had greatly increased. In some fields new Internet retailers such as the Amazon bookseller company seem to have grown up overnight and begun successfully competing with traditional retailers.
Most of recently established companies are known to include the electronic commerce in their business as well. For example, the Intel. Corporation sold almost half of its chips in the annual computer sales directly through its Web site in 1999 and is planning to move all of its sales to the Web by the end of 2000.
