New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback

One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.

Comments

What about other downsides?

[DesScorp]

Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...

I first got the computer bug seriously when I was in college, and took some courses requiring the use of dumb terminals in our computer center... they were running off a DEC minicomputer running Unix, and I was hooked. I learned to do a lot using those old green and orange screen terminals, and to this day, I wonder if most businesses wouldn't be incredibly more productive if they went back to simple no-GUI dumb terminals... with text email and Lynx browsers.

Think about it. How many employees now blow off hours at a time during the workday by playing solitaire, going to MySpace, releasing the latest trojan into their LAN via email attachments...

Even with a GUI terminal, if it was stripped down and wasn't Windows based (and had drastically limited Internet access), I think a lot more would get done around offices.