Digital Nervous System is a phrase, popularly associated with Bill Gates of Microsoft, used to describe a vision for how the IT infrastructure of an enterprise could be analogous to the autonomic nervous system of a biological organism. Gates made extensive use of the term in his 1999 book Business @ The Speed of Thought. The actual phrase Digital Nervous System may not have originated with Gates however, as it has been reported that Judith Dayhoff used the term before Gates did. Steve Ballmer attempted to explain the Digital Nervous System by saying the following: