Personal, Distributed and Client/Server Computing

Personal, Distributed and Client Server Computing

In 1977, Apple Computer popularized personal computing. Computers became so economical that people could buy them for their own personal or business use. In 1981, IBM, the world's largest computer vendor, introduced the IBM Personal Computer. This quickly legitimized personal computing in business, industry and government organizations.

These computers were "standalone" unitspeople transported disks back and forth between them to share information (often called "sneakernet"). Although early personal computers were not powerful enough to timeshare several users, these machines could be linked together in computer networks, sometimes over telephone lines and sometimes in local area networks (LANs) within an organization. This led to the phenomenon of distributed computing, in which an organization's computing, instead of being performed only at some central computer installation, is distributed over networks to the sites where the organization's work is performed. Personal computers were powerful enough to handle the computing requirements of individual users as well as the basic communications tasks of passing information between computers electronically.

Today's personal computers are as powerful as the million-dollar machines of just two decades ago. The most powerful desktop machinescalled workstationsprovide individual users with enormous capabilities. Information is shared easily across computer networks where computers called file servers offer a common data store that may be used by client computers distributed throughout the network, hence the term client/server computing. Java has become widely used for writing software for computer networking and for distributed client/server applications. Today's popular operating systems, such as UNIX, Linux, Apple Mac OS X (pronounced "O-S ten") and Microsoft Windows, provide the kinds of capabilities discussed in this section.