Before, computers and software data management in laboratories was a tedious and time consuming task.  With handwritten reports and charts, there was a higher probability of human error to occur.  Laboratory information management systems (LIMS) were only first developed in-house by the early 1980s.  In 1982, the first generation commercial LIMS was created providing the first automated reporting features.  By assigning laboratory functions to a centralized computer, productivity and functionality improved.As technology advances and work flow changes, the need for application specific features emerged.  This initiated the development of second generation LIMS which was possible by using third-party commercial relational databases through the use of minicomputers.  By the early 1990s the first client/server configuration was developed using a PC combined with the security of a minicomputer.  Functionality “appeared” quicker by splitting the data processing between several clients and the main database server.