Give the man a silver dollar!!!!!!!!!
The place where I use to work had a mini tower as well as a pc network
(also called a LAN for Local Area Network) which was linked to the tower
(The tower had the manufacturing, purchasing, accounting stuff on it and
the lan was for product development) as well as individual pc's in
various offices.  Almost all of the pc's were capable of using various
communications programs to link to the tower.  When you're using a pc in
a communications program (sometimes also called terminal mode) you're
essentially "dumming down" the pc.  The advantage is that if you want to
capture something off the tower, you can use a capture mode that most
communications programs have, and literally capture information from the
host system.  There the distinction between pc and main frame was really
starting to blur.
At my former place of employment they were going towards using the tower
to take care of the "corporate stuff", and the pc's allowed various
departments and personnel to do a much better job of developing and
tracking items.  I was using Microsoft Word and Excell extensively.  I
was even starting to pull records off the tower and archive them off my
pc so we could delete records off the tower.
Does that help?
Mike
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