A Bus
A cable hooks up a bus network’s computers in parallel in the manner of lights on some Christmas trees.
A bus network may offer advantages in office layouts. You don’t have to clutter things up with a whole series of wires running back to fancy equipment in a central location. You just lay one main wire with sockets that the individual micros plug into.
Other equipment needs may be simple. The WEB, a bus network, requires printed circuit boards for all computers, installed in the machines themselves. That’s about it other than the software and the wire.
Fancier systems using a bus—like most versions of Ethernet and Corvus Systems’ popular micro network called Omninet—need a file server.
A file server can be a computer minus the keyboard and screen but with extra communications ports to help signals get in and out in a hurry. It’s connected to the hard disk, which stores and relays the electronic files that people send it. In some networks a file server can also be a regular computer simply assigned to the job.
With a server arrangement you’re always sharing files with the server rather than directly with other members of the network. The hard disk is between you and the machine you’re trying to reach.
By the way, if everyone must use software from the server, that means a very, very busy hard disk—and potentially slower running programs.