History of Client/Server Computing

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the history of client/server computing from its inception in the 1980s as a reference to personal computers on a network. It charts its development over the past couple of decades and concludes that client/server still remains the only and best architecture for taking advantage of the Internet and other new technologies that come along. It also contends that regardless of what comes, client/server computing is likely to remain the underpinning for most computing developments over the next decade.

From the Paper:

"Although both the mainframe and file server-based systems continue to provide service to business, they fail to provide a truly scalable framework for building competitive business solutions. The major factor is that logic must be executed on either the mainframe in a centralized architecture, or on the client in a file server-based architecture. Because of the limitations of mainframe and file sharing architectures, the client/server architecture emerged. This approach introduced a database server to replace the file server. Using a relational database management system (DBMS), user queries could be answered directly. The client/server architecture reduced network traffic by providing a query response rather than total file transfer. It improves multi-user updating through a GUI front end to a shared database. "

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