Distributed Processing — Past, Present and Future

Remember distributed processing back in the late 1970s? Intelligence at the workstation was primitive back then. All of the benefits of distributed processing were based on multiple host computers, each with their own set of input/output devices. One benefit of distributed processing in the '70s was lower processing costs, based on the fact that a number of networked minicomputers could be acquired and maintained at a lower cost than running a centralised mainframe. Another benefit was reduced downtime. If one host went down, then processing could be distributed among other host computers in the network.