Host

Hosts are the endpoints of the matrix. The host is analogous to the websites of today. Anything that can or will be done in the matrix will happen at a host. From the virtual perspective of the decker a Host appears as effective a room, or virtual space within which they can act. Hosts come in many standard varieties and a host can have within it many individual data stores,slave devices, IC constructs, or even other live users.

It is important to understand there is not necessarily a 1:1 correspondence between a host and a physical machine. Much like today's websites, you can run multiple hosts on a single computer. Even more important to note is the distributed processing nature of the matrix prohibits even trying to quantify a physical node (processor) for every logical node (host). The bottom line is by 2060 one single piece of hardware almost never represents anything you will ever see in the matrix (with the odd exception of live users who are in fact only 50% quantified by their cyberterminals and 50% quantified by whatever network they are currently "running" on). The bottom line is everything a decker will ever do occurs in a host.