Re: I'm not saying this isn't possible.
You bring up a good point. A person's experience with "dumb terminal" type
architectures will definitely shape the way they view this Internet appliance
idea. Obviously, your experience with "dumb terminals" or thin clients as
they are called now, didn't exactly bowl you over. My experience is very different.
I do hardware design and all I had in my office was an X-terminal. The X-terminal
had an ethernet connection and on the building LAN there were several dozen Sparc
servers. Using that X-terminal I was able to access any one of those servers
to do word processing, access databases, call up a web browser, or even do highly
compute intensive stuff like run a 250K-gate ASIC simulation. The number of users
in the building was in the hundreds but we never really had any system problems like
you describe. If the server I was using was heavily loaded, I just accessed a different
server. If the users' demand for processing power grew, our MIS department would
just add some more servers to the network. This "dumb terminal" met our needs
quite well.
For an interesting article on X-terminals and the resurgence of the thin client in
the business office, check out the following:
techweb.cmp.com
In my mind, the internet appliance looks a lot like an X-terminal. So, based on my
experiences, I believe that the IA idea will work given the availability of a cheap,
fast network connection. |
