The Evolution of Computer Applications

In the earliest days of computerized business applications, all the processing took place on mainframes, with the client having no role other than displaying information from the server and accepting user input. This setup was largely dictated by the high cost of processing power. Spreading powerful clients throughout the enterprise was simply not affordable, so all processing was consolidated and “dumb terminals” provided the user interaction.

As memory and processing power became cheaper, dumb terminals were replaced by microcomputers (or personal computers). With the added power, more desktop applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, could run as stand-alone applications, so no server was necessary. One challenge faced by organizations with microcomputers was a lack of centralized data. While the mainframe era had everything centralized, the age of microcomputer-distributed data made it more difficult to centralize business rules and synchronize data across the enterprise.