Archive

Tag: client

A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a 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. The client–server model is still used today. Client and server can run on the same machine and connect via Unix domain sockets, or other inter-process communication techniques such as shared memory, or named pipes. Using Internet sockets a user may connect to a service operating on a possibly remote system through the Internet protocol suite. Servers set up listening sockets, and clients initiate connections that a server may accept. Web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Most people use…