With the 1980s came a proliferation of inexpensive hardware. Everyone got a workstation on their desks, and carefully configured it to their personal taste. But if you walked down the hall to use another machine with different resources, you could only access those on your own machine by bringing a floppy, or perhaps using a local network. But the remote access method was different from using the resources locally. In essence, every desk had its own single-system image.