Warp wrote:

>   I laughed some years ago when they introduced a really revolutionary and
> innovative new concept: Dumb terminals. Of course the marketing speech didn't
> say that dumb terminals have existed for something like 30 years (and fallen
> mostly out of use by about the mid-90's).

Ah yes, and that's the other thing. Computer technology seems to 
progress in cycles.

Once upon a time, everybody used dumb terminals connected to a socking 
great mainframe in the center. This was considered the ultimate way forward.

Then people decided that it was better to have powerful computers on 
individual people's desks, so that the cost of the hardware could be 
spread out as PCs are purchased one at a time, rather than having to 
spend on one huge mainframe, all at once.

And then everybody started getting excited about "thin clients". Have 
one central server that runs all the software; you only have to install 
and configure it once. Then you give everybody cheap-arse PCs and let 
them access the software remotely using VNC / HTTP / whatever.

In other words, dumb terminals.

I suspect what it comes down to is that both thin client and thick 
client approaches have advantages, so the market will forever oscilate 
between the two, continually deciding that whichever approach is 
currently unpopular is the "new" and "revolutionary" one that everybody 
should adopt, seeing its advantages and forgetting its disadvantages. 
Until the cycle repeats.

Also... that was fairly poor sentence structure. :-/

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