Telecommuting

History

In the early 1970s, technology was developed that linked satellite offices to downtown mainframes through dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The terms telecommuting and telework were coined by Jack Nilles in 1973. By 1984 a United Technologies programmer lived in Washington state and telecommuted to his Connecticut office, and the company estimated that executives with computers at home did another two hours of work there. In January 1986, Erik Sandberg Diment of The New York Times reported in his weekly column that "As one of the seemingly few people to be actively engaged in telecommuting", he had only visited his office twice in the previous year. In 1979, five IBM employees were allowed to work from home as an experiment. By 1983, the experiment was expanded to 2,000 people. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulators.