Working at home and communicating with the office by phone, fax and computer. In the U.S., at the beginning of the 21st century, more than 30 million Americans were telecommuting at least one day a week. Also called "teleworking" and "e-working."
Goes Way Back
In the 1960s, the information technology industry was one of the first to offer telecommuting to its employees. In those days, a small number of programmers worked at home one or more days a week; however, the only communications link to the office was the telephone. There were no modems attached to desktop computers because there were no desktop computers. A few programmers may have had the luxury of a terminal connected to a mainframe or minicomputer, but the majority wrote source code using a pen and paper. They created the input by "punching cards" and did the testing at a local datacenter. See virtual company, telecity, ROWE and hoteling.
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