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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems

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To: Stormweaver who wrote (17506)	7/1/1999 4:08:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (3) of 64865

James: I see the JavaStation and similar appliances as gussied up Dumb Terminals. Quicker net connection, colour screen but essentially an inert box that depends on a network and server that is up 100% of the time and needs to bootstrap/download any information from a server to be able to do anything. A dumb terminal has enough memory for a keyboard buffer, a screen buffer and not much else. The user types into the keyboard buffer, the characters are echoed to the screen and special control keys on the keyboard send the contents of the formatted screen buffer to a host which parses the buffer contents according to a session-layer protocol (e.g. 3270). The program you are running on the host sends back a response to your screen buffer and you go on from there. When the terminal is turned off, your connection is broken and when it is turned on again it is reconnected to a transport layer connection just prior to logging in. No software is down-loaded or even side-loaded into a dumb terminal. There is no boot procedure. It's either off & disconnected or on & connected. If the host goes down, so does the terminal. Your use of "gussied up" is a nice try at hedging your bets, but the JavaStation bears no resemblence to a dumb terminal, which is why it's called a thin client instead. I hate to break the bad news to you, but all your so-called "dumb terminals" are going to take over the client business both at home and in the office, and neutralize the pc market. I remember a couple of years ago Gates said the same thing. He wanted to hedge his bets so MSFT came out with the "Winterm" which was a real dumb terminal. It was vintage Gates: a clueless pronouncement on technology he never understood to begin with followed by a product introduction that was doomed to failure. BTW: anyone heard about what happened to the "Winterm" and "Zero Administration PC's" ???? Your arguements in favor of old-style desktop systems is getting tiresome. We need some new blood in the devil's advocacy corner.

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