thin client

networking A simple client program or hardware device

which relies on most of the function of the system being in

the server.

Gopher clients, for example, are very thin; they are

stateless and are not required to know how to interpret and

display objects much more complex than menus and plain text.

Gopher servers, on the other hand, can search databases and

provide gateways to other services.

By the mid-1990s, the model of decentralised computing where

each user has his own full-featured and independent

microcomputer, seemed to have displaced a centralised model

in which multiple users use thin clients (e.g. dumbterminals) to work on a shared minicomputer or mainframe

server. Networked personal computers typically operate as

"fat clients", often providing everything except some file

storage and printing locally.

By 1996, reintroduction of thin clients is being proposed,

especially for LAN-type environments (see the cycle ofreincarnation). The main expected benefit of this is ease of

maintenance: with fat clients, especially those suffering from

the poor networking support of Microsoft operatingsystems, installing a new application for everyone is likely

to mean having to physically go to every user's workstation to

install the application, or having to modify client-side

configuration options; whereas with thin clients the

maintenance tasks are centralised on the server and so need

only be done once.

Also, by virtue of their simplicity, thin clients generally

have fewer hardware demands, and are less open to being

screwed up by ambitious lusers.

Never one to miss a bandwagon, Microsoft bought up InsigniaSolutions, Inc.'s "NTRIGUE" Windows remote-access product

and combined it with Windows NT version 4 to allow thin

clients (either hardware or software) to communicate with

applications running under on a server machine under WindowsTerminal Server in the same way as X had done for Unix

decades before.

(1999-02-01)