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.

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 ...

His sale of his company's storied personal computer division may be the strongest indication that Sam Palmisano believes the PC's status as a business computing tool is in decline. But if there were ...

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 ...

One of the buzzwords to emerge over the past year is that of "serverless" computing or architecture, which, as the term suggests, involves the provisioning of key information technology resources to ...

Red Hat is in the midst of changing its image from a top Linux company to the future king of cloud computing. CEO Jim Whitehurst told me in 2011 that the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud would be ...

If you had predicted in 2006 that this crazy new thing called Amazon Web Services would upend the $3 trillion enterprise computing industry and cause companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft to shake ...

Spring is in the air, and like many of us, Microsoft is looking to slim down for summer. Despite its former reluctance to support thin-client computing, it looks like Microsoft has loosened up and ...