Re: Personal Firewall Day?

[Crispin Cowan <crispin () immunix com>]

Christopher Hicks wrote:

> Moving to a "grid computing" world with dumb desktop nodes would make me a
> very happy camper.
The world of dumb desktops has come and gone three times during my 
computing career.

   * Mainframes & minis with dumb terminals from the dawn of time to
     the microcomputer revolution of the late 70s
         o disrupted by Sun workstations & PCs in the early 80s
   * X-terminals and diskless workstations in the late 80s (kinda dumb
     terminals with a lot of power) came about because storage was
     expensive and using NAS for your OS saved a lot of disk space
         o wiped out by diskful workstations in the early 90s when
           drives got cheap and performance blew away NAS for latency
           on important things like swap and /usr/bin
   * "thin clients" in the mid 90s: we were all supposed to do
     everything in a browser, making operating systems obsolete. Or
     maybe it was a diskless Java workstation, or something
         o never got off the ground

The first wave of dumb terminals lasted 30 years. The second lasted 
about 5, and the third never got off the ground.

I submit that dumb terminals are dead & gone, until & unless something 
happens that makes massive central storage vastly cheaper than local 
storage. At the moment, local storage is actually cheaper than machine 
room spindles, so the trend is going the other way.

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.           http://immunix.com/~crispin/
Chief Scientist, Immunix       http://immunix.com
           http://www.immunix.com/shop/



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