Our journey through the history of IT infrastructure starts with the centralised mainframe era kicked off by IBM in the 1960s and advances through to the cloud-based, server-less world we now occupy. In between, we’ve seen the eras of personal computers, client/server computing and web-based enterprise computing, all of which have transformed the way businesses operate.
The personal computing era, for example, was driven by the proliferation of PCs and desktop productivity software tools such as spreadsheets and word processors in the early 1980s, which appealed to personal and corporate users alike.
This was followed by the rise of powerful server computers that were linked to ‘clients’ – i.e. desktop and laptop PCs – to provide users with a variety of capabilities in the client/server age of the late 1980s and the enterprise computing era of the 1990s, which was driven by the need to integrate disparate networks and applications together in a single infrastructure amidst the growth of the World Wide Web.
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