mall business focus. Machines like the Apple, Osborne, and Kaypro were smaller and offered integrated keyboards and video dis- plays. In 1981, of course, IBM entered the market with the DOS-based personal PC, and soon the world was a very different place. Apple fol- lowed with the Macintosh and the first commercially available graphical user interface (GUI), and the rest, as they say, is history. Soon corpora- tions embraced the PC; "a chicken in every pot, a computer on every desk" seemed to be the rallying cry for IT departments everywhere. There was a downside to this evolution, of course. The arrival of the PC heralded the arrival of a new era in computing that allowed every individual to have his own applications, her own file structures, and his own data. The good news was that each person now controlled his or her own individual computer resources; the bad news was that each person now controlled his or her own individual computer resources. Suddenly the control was gone: Instead of having a copy of the database, there were now as many copies as there were users. This led to huge problems. Fur- thermore, PC proliferation led to another challenge: connectivity, or lack of it. Whereas before every user had electronic access to every other user Figure 5-13 The ALTAIR computer (Photo courtesy Jim Willing, The Computer Garage) ALTAIR 8800 COMPUTER ALTAIR DISK Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Premises Technologies Chapter 5 via the mainframe or minicomputer-based network that hooked every- one together, the PC did not have that advantage. Furthermore, PCs eliminated the efficiency with which expensive network resources such as printers could be shared. Some of you may remember the days when being the person in the office with The Laser Printer attached to your machine was akin to approaching a state of Nirvana. You were able 