September 3, 1996
If the driving force for the past 10 years has been to buy computing power over all else, the trend has now switched to buying bandwidth. The amount of data you can move between systems is rapidly becoming more important than the actual amount of data that can be crunched inside a system. And as bandwidth becomes the major criterion, more and more bandwidth in more and more media is becoming available.
A second force is the increased reliability of server-side computing. New servers coming into the marketplace offer the speed, redundancy and reliability that had been promised frequently but delivered sparingly in the past. One of the real ironies of client/server computing is that just as the server side of the equation has finally caught up to the promise of power on the server side, that new generation of servers has ushered in a new thin client capability.
The third trend is the increased development of software able to take advantage of the dispersed nature of a thin client system. Together, these three trends help counter the bad rap that terminal-based systems have always had in the past: too slow and too rooted in yesterday's technologies. As a result, It looks like you will not only see NC's replacing PC's in the home, but you will also see it replacing all those dumb terminals used in transaction-based retail applications.