1980-90s: Personal Computers and Networking
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981.
The decentralization of computing resources,
now data and not the hardware,
required more support for inter-operating system
communication - both physical support and application program support.
As minicomputers shrunk in size, but exploded in capacity, the powerful
computer workstation was born.
Companies such as Sun Microsystems (SUN)
and Silicon Graphics (SGI) rode this wave of success.
Local-area networks (primarily Ethernet and token-ring) connected
workstations, while wide-area networks connected minicomputers.
Operating system developments included the development of fast and
efficient network communication protocols, data encryption (of networks
and file systems), security, reliability, and consistency of distributed
data.
CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 3, p15, 29th July 2024.
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CITS2002