Types of Networks
The earliest forms of distributed computing made use of a crude form of networking in which the client computers wholly depended on the server's services — including the display output and applications (Burghart). In fact, the client sends every keystroke to the server for processing, and then the server tells the client what to display on its screen. Although the server seems to handle all the tasks, these clients — known as terminals — handle part of the presentation layer of an application by taking care of keyboard input and display output. Terminals are widely employed in libraries as digital card catalogs and in data warehouses.

Advantages to the terminal interface system are the low maintenance and cost of the terminals. Terminals are not difficult to program, because the programmer does not need to incorporate communication routines into his program (Burghart). The terminal automatically displays whatever the server sends, whereas regular client computers need software to interpret the server's messages and then show it onscreen. However, the text-only interface limits the functionality of terminals, and may be difficult for users who prefer the mouse-driven graphical user interfaces offered by Windows and Macintosh.

Because the Internet is basically a network made up of so many networks, people can send their work out and spread it out and make other people's computers do it. How about that?

The Internet is essentially a server-client network (see figure 6). You may have seen Netscape or any other Internet program tell you that it is contacting a "host" or a "server" — both mean the same thing. That server is the computer you are connecting to. What makes the Internet powerful is the multitudes of servers, each with different, specialized jobs: file servers transfer files upon request, mail servers send and receive e-mail messages, newsgroup servers send and receive newsgroup messages, chat servers transfer Internet relay chat messages... there are many, many different types of servers. They all give your computer what it asks for, because they are there to serve your computer, the client.