Two major needs have dramatically increased the value of the concept of grid computing in the last few years. A lean economy has forced those with a limited IT budget to more fully utilize their existing computing assets and to become more flexible to respond to rapidly evolving markets by being able to intelligently allocate finite resources to the appropriate business applications. In this first of a series of articles, the author provides a cursory analysis of the similarities and differences between grid computing and such distributed computing systems as P2P, CORBA, cluster computing, and DCE.