According to Ackoff, the beginning of the end of the Machine Age and the beginning of the Systems Age could be dated to the 1940s, a decade when philosophers, mathematicians and biologists, building on developments in the interwar period, defined a new intellectual framework. The key development was the new systems approach, defined by Ackoff as follows:
A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole. It losses its essential properties when it is take apart. The elements of a system may themselves by system, and every system may be part of a larger system (Ackoff, 1073)
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