The Emergence of Home Networks

In the past, a typical family might have felt lucky to have just one computer in the home. Today, as computers extend further into our everyday lives, more and more families are acquiring multiple computers. For example, you and your spouse might have laptops that you bring home from work, the family might have a desktop computer for Internet surfing and balancing the checkbook, and your children might have a computer for schoolwork and playing games. However, having multiple computers doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making the most of the new home networking technologies.

A computer by itself is only as powerful as its hardware and the software and information it contains. But if you connect two or more computers together to form a network, each computer becomes more powerful because it can share information and resources with the others. For example, with computers on a network, you can exchange files with a few clicks of the mouse, instead of having to use floppy disks to transfer information from computer to computer.