client/server

In the beginning there were just lone computers networked to dumb terminals.
Early computer networks from the 1950s to the 1970s were usually just one
computer with multiple keyboards, teletypes, printers and displays attached
to them.

From the late 1970s onwards with the appearance of the first personal
computers this started to change. Early PCs were a lot less powerful than
the existing mainframes and minicomputers and so a division of labor
between them made sense and the client/server paradigm was born.
The server stored and often also batch processed data which it obtained
from networked clients. Local computing on client PCs could better handle
things like realtime graphics display with minimal latency.

The client/server paradigm continues today in the form of cloud computing,
where data is often not stored on phones or laptops but on a cloud server
somewhere.

Contrast with mesh network.