In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. The term was first applied to devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone programs, but could interact with remote computers via a network. These dumb terminals were clients of the time-sharing mainframe computer. Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes. ... For the Macintosh operating system, which was called System up to version 7. ... The tower of a personal computer (specifically a Power Mac G5). ... A wide variety of systems of interconnected components are called networks. ... A Device can be taken to mean: an electrical device designed to carry power, but not use it. ... A computer program (often simply called a program) is an example of computer software that prescribes the actions (computations) that are to be carried out by a computer. ... A dumb terminal in computing consists of a computer screen and keyboard, but practically no processing ability. ... Alternate uses: see Timesharing Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time. ... Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for legacy applications, typically bulk data processing (such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing). ...

The client-server model is still used today on the Internet, where a user may connect to a service operating on a remote system through the internet protocol suite. Web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Most people use e-mail clients to retrieve their e-mail from their internet service provider's mail storage servers. Online chat uses a variety of clients, which vary depending on the chat protocol being used. Client/Server is a network application architecture which separates the client (usually the graphical user interface) from the server. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... A web browser is a software package that enables a user to display and interact with documents hosted by web servers. ... The term web server can mean one of two things: a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers; a software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents. ... A Web page or webpage is a page of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... An email client (or mail user agent [MUA]) is a computer program that is used to read and send email. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... An Internet service provider (ISP) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. ... Online chat is a generic term for what are now mostly known as instant messaging applications—computer programs that enable two-way typing to connect users to each other. ...

Increasingly, these days, more and more large client applications are being switched to websites, making the browser a sort of universal client. This avoids the hassle of downloading a large piece of software onto any computer you want to use the application on. An example of this is the rise of webmail. Webmail is a web application that allows users to read and write e-mail using a web browser. ...

See also

• Client-side
• Server