Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Distributed Applications/Groupware

As with client/server data systems, there is a wide and rapidly changing array of network applications. This section will illustrate some current and developing types, beginning with the rather pedestrian topic of e-mail and concluding with the exotic (but likely soon ordinary) issue of agent software.

E-mail and Calendaring

Perhaps the thing that most people first use and most appreciate on a network is e-mail. E-mail isn't native to the LAN, though; this kind of software has long been available in mainframe environments. Early e-mail vendors were fiercely proprietary hardware/software vendors like IBM, DEC, HP, and Wang. Like most other products these companies then offered, the software didn't interact well ...