1913: Henry Ford and the Assembly Line Realizing that he'd need to lower costs The use of interchangeable parts meant making the individual pieces of the car the same every time. Therefore the machines had to be improved, but once they were adjusted, they could be operated by a low-skilled laborer. To reduce the time workers spent moving around Ford refined the flow of work in the manner that as one task was finished another began, with minimum time spent in set-up. Furthermore he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the legendary Model T in 84 distinct steps. Putting all those findings together in 1913 Ford installed the first moving |
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Key-Systems As stated, telecommunication is seen as an unreliable media for transporting secret messages. Therefore today, cryptography is needed more than ever before, especially for e-commerce. Key cryptosystems try to provide more privacy. symmetric-key cryptosystems: The same key is used for both encryption and decryption. In this case the encipherer and the recipient of the message/text have to agree on a common key before the enciphering-process can start. And most of all they should trust each other. And exactly this is the main problem of this system: how to exchange the key without offering an opportunity for stealing it? In former times messengers or pigeons were doing the exchange of those keys. Symmetric-key systems make sense in small entities. If a lot of people are spread over a wide area and belong to the same network, distributing the keys starts getting complicated. Today, those cryptosystems get controlled by other keys, based on highly complex mathematical algorithms. some symmetric-key systems are: - DES (Data Encryption Standard), the standard for credit cards - Triple-DES, which is a variation of DES, encrypting the plaintext three times. - IDEA (International Data Encryption Standard) - blowfish encryption algorithm, which is said to be faster than DES and IDEA Security and confidence are the key-words for a popular key-system: As DES and its successors have been used for so many years and by many people without having been broken, they are considered safe - safer than others, not used that frequently, no matter whether they are actually safer or not. For further information see: |
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Optical communication system by Aeneas Tacitus, 4th century B.C. Aeneas Tacitus, a Greek military scientist and cryptographer, invented an optical communication system that combines water and beacon telegraphy. Torches indicated the beginnings and the ends of message transmissions while water jars were used to transmit the messages. These jars had a plugged standard-size hole drilled on the bottom side and were filled with water. As those who sent and those who received the message unplugged the jars simultaneously, the water drained out. Because the transmitted messages corresponded to water levels, the sender indicated by torch signal that the appropriate water level has been reached. It is a disadvantage that the possible messages are restricted to a given code, but as this system was mainly used for military purposes, this was offset by the advantage that it was almost impossible for outsiders to understand these messages unless they possessed the codebook. With communication separated from transportation, the distant became near. Tacitus' telegraph system was very fast and not excelled until For further information see Joanne Chang & Anna Soellner, Decoding Device, |
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Division of labor The term refers to the separation of a work process into a number of tasks, with each task performed by a separate person or group of persons. It is most often applied to |
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