Anand Parthasarathy wrote Get set for the enterprise grid and gave an overview of five generations of distributed computing as follows.

1. Host-based Computing
2. Remote Access Computing
3. Client/Server Computing
4. Multi-tier Computing
5. Grid Computing

He also mentioned to the five elements to make grid work.

1. Blades
2. Clustering
3. Provisioning
4. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
5. Virtualization