m file transfers and log into other computers remotely. It would still take a few more years until SNA was developed enough to enable programs running on different systems to almost seamlessly communi- cate with each other, synchronize themselves, and exchange data in real time. This became possible in the late 1980s. In the midst of all this change in the late twentieth century, semiconductor technology underwent a revolution. Because more powerful capabilities could be integrated into a silicon microchip, users could envision the ever-increasing possibilities in terms of the complexity, the integration of func- tions, the speed, and the accuracy. The commensurate progress that was made in software engineer- ing, which was essentially driven forward by the ever-increasing requirements of new and more sophisticated IT applications, continued to try to use the available hardware capabilities. This formed an endless loop: Faster hardware was needed to run the more sophisticated software. The more sophis- ticated the software became, the more powerful the underlying hardware had to become. Central pro- cessing units (CPUs) became faster and more complex by first packing hundreds of thousands and then millions of transistors and even millions of logical gates on a chip (with typically four, six, or even eight transistors per logical gate). It was only a matter of time before the centralized IT fabric changed. Computing power was essen- tially going to break up and would be physically distributed around corporate and organizational sites. DEPARTMENTAL MACHINES ERODE THE MAINFRAME'S FOLLOWING The organizational and political reasons why a corporate department, such as manufacturing or R&D, did not like to be connected to and controlled by a corporate IT center go beyond the subject of this book; however, they remain a fact of life. The founders of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Hewlett-Packard, Prime, and Data General, which pioneered the so-called midrange systems or departmental machines, unde