And yes, it is certified Year 2000 Compliant. Take your pick. Hold on, this may get a bit technical. Most Local Area Networks or LANs run as file servers, meaning they operate as a shared remote disk drive for client workstations. These networks are optimal for document based processing such as word-processing and spreadsheet applications because they provide a dedicated processor for working with large amounts of data in memory and share the infrequent access to disk drives.
Transaction based systems, such as accounting applications, are the opposite.
They process a single transaction at a time requiring little memory and processor resources and spend most of their time moving data between memory and the disk drives. For example, processing a sales order is not much more than extending the quantity by the price but the Customer Master, Terms Code, Salesman, Inventory Item, Warehouse, Product Line files, to name a few, must be read and written over the network. Not the same as reading a document, moving lots of data around for ten minutes, then writing it back. The dedicated processor and abundant memory are wasted and the slowest link, the remote disk access, is overworked. While the programs do reside on the File Server host, they are downloaded and actually execute on the workstation.