PrefaceThe purpose of this book is to teach you something about the computer. Ourassumption is that you are a business student or a business professional. Com-puters have had a profound effect on the world of business; in fact, it is difficult toimagine a professional or managerial position that has not already been affectedby these machines. If you plan a career in business, you will encounter computers. Thus it isessential that you become computer literate. When you finish this book, youshould have a solid understanding of computer terminology. More importantly,you should have a sense of how all the pieces of a computer fit together.Technology will change. However, your sense of a complete "system" will giveyou a framework against which to measure new technology. This statement ofobjectives is paraphrased from the preface of the first edition of this book; it hasnot changed. However, technology has. Thus several major changes have beenmade to the second edition of Computers and Business Information Processing.Over the past few years, the structured approach to systems analysis and designhas become widely accepted, and thus structured methodologies have beenincorporated. The Pascal language has also been added, and the style of all theprogram examples changed to better illustrate the underlying principles ofstructured programming. The discussion of data management now emphasizesmodem data base techniques, rather than traditional files, and a new chapter ondata base management has been added. In the first edition, short case studies were used to illustrate and reenforcekey technical concepts. They have been updated, and new cases added tosupport the data base and distributed data processing chapters. Additionally, thecase studies have been more clearly identified in the new edition, appearing asindependent modules, loosely linked to the material they support. The modularapproach has also been extended to the programming languages. Elementary