It wasn’t so long ago that the mainframe ruled IT. Most of our computing work was done by big iron hooked to dumb terminals. Centralized computing was the standard because networks had yet to evolve ...

In a client-server environment, an organization's files, and sometimes its applications, are stored not on individual desktop computers but on centralized servers instead. That "client-server" ...

Old computer systems were very easy to understand. You would simply enter data into your workstation and it would be fed to the mainframe computer. Called a master/slave system, the mainframe master ...

Few IT duties are as universal as the care and feeding of the corporate desktop. While other aspects of IT get easier thanks to new technologies like server virtualization, there’s still no magic pill ...

Desktop virtualization-separating a PC desktop environment from a physical machine using a client-server set-up-will ramp up U.S. Defense Department computing efficiencies and cut costs significantly.

Local area networks are now a part of most businesses and organizations, providing connectivity between computers, printers and other devices and facilitating efficient communications within a ...

When William Hill became director of IT at the city of Dayton, Ohio, in 1988, one of the first major projects he tackled was to rein in the total cost of ownership of desktop clients. At the time, ...

For a while now I’ve thought of cloud as a new model of computing in the IT world. For the IT industry, a new computing model is a very big deal. In the 60 years or so since there’s been an IT ...

As the Windows client environment has become richer and more powerful over the years, it has become more difficult to manage. Even on a stable and reliable version of Windows--meaning Windows 2000 or ...

Old models of computing always tend to linger too long, but client-server was based on a fallacy -- and needs to go away sooner rather than later I write this week from IBM’s Insight conference in Las ...

Microsoft Corp. was once an avowed opponent of network computing, thin clients or anything else that threatened to harm Windows’ hegemony by putting the PC on a crash diet. Over the years, the company ...

An architecture in which the user's PC or mobile device (the client) is the requesting machine and the server is the supplying machine, both of which are connected via a local area network (LAN) or a ...