Re: Personal Firewall Day?

[David Lang <david.lang () digitalinsight com>]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Crispin Cowan wrote:

> 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.

the only thing that could bring dumb terminals back is a revolt against
the support nightmare that we are currently in. this is happening in a few
places, but it will take breaking the microsoft dependancy to do this so
it's not going to be everywhere and it's going to be moving slowly for a
while.

one of the biggest problems with all the past dumb desktops is that they
have required different software then what was available on the
stand-alone machines (and traditionally the centralized software was much
more expensive on a per-seat basis)

as linux makes progress on desktops you have the potential to do the
X-term thing (useing the local CPU more as well as the display) but where
the software can run on normal hardware so it could be deployed on laptops
and home systems as well as the office.

this isn't anything that will completely take over, but it could become a
noticable percentage of the corporate world.

the silly costs of machine room storage is a problem, but the desktop
storage has exceeded the corporate requirements so drasticly that this
should start filtering back to the machine room (raid boxes that use IDE
drives and can get a TB of raid 5 with a hot spare on 5 320G disks for
example)

David Lang
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