Return of the Dumb Terminal

History repeats itself. Like old fashions come back, old ways of computing may be coming back into fashion once more. Listen to this:

Rather than deploying particular windows applications onto all your desktops, resulting in an administration and support nightmare, install the application on one central server and use 2X ApplicationServer for Windows Terminal Services to seamlessly tunnel the application onto remote desktops. Users will never know that the application is running remotely and you will be able to manage the application from a single location! Transmitting just the screen updates rather than the client server data is often faster too.

Sounds familiar? This I spotted while reading about an application sharing server, which by the way is a "new" product.

There was a time when dumb terminals were in use, where, the user had only a monitor and keyboard (only interface at the time) while the processing was on the server. The terminal was only used for interaction and the server did the rest. Then came the trend of workstations in the "client-server" configuration. Which too did the processing on the server but the workstation was able to do more work as the client running on these machines were called "thick clients", which means that these applications had a lot of functionality built into them and that required local processing. Then came the "thin client" in the same client-server configuration, specifically your browser. Which contains minimum functionality on the client end and rest is handled on the server side, which is considered as great benefit of the web-based applications.

Now from the thin-client it seems we are entering (returning) into the dumb terminal age, once again. The hassles caused by these workstations and clients where the user has to buy so many applications and then has to be supported. It seems more reasonable to have a dumb terminal with minimal functionality for interfacing while the rest is done through the network. With the coming of broadband this is really not so difficult any more. You can have your applications as web-services or such shared applications. You would use online storage, online email, online gaming, online wordprocessing, online music etc etc etc.