Are Dumb Terminals Getting Repackaged?

Back in the mid 90's I remember that there was plenty of debate at organizations as to whether it was better to deploy fully functional PC's, or those invariably beige dumb terminals. IT types argued that the dumb terminals were cheaper to deploy, easier to upgrade, and posed less of a security risk (maybe virtually none). Yeah, nobody was plugging in their USB key or iPod to any of those beige screens.

Around the same time, I was employed intermittently at a not so secret governmental facility. Throughout the place, they had terminals like you see pictured above and to the right. They consisted of a keyboard, which plugged into the monitor. Mouse? We didn't need no stinkin' mouse! The monitor (ours were orange monochromatic models) then plugged into the wall outlet for power, and into an Ethernet connection for data. It was a model of simplicity. These boxes, ugly and dumb as all heck, were quite simple to support centrally, for as far as I could tell, they had no internal processing power. Everything was done at the server level, and we had access to email, word processing, and data based applications- but not the World Wide Web. With no way to plug in a peripheral, this network was locked down tighter than a drum, and it was absolutely secure, even from the floppy discs that were popular back then. I had heard that they had six servers running all of this, and it never went down, but it did slow down significantly a few times as they had to take some of them offline. At the time, I also thought that it was pretty dumb that these appliances couldn't do anything on their own.

Enough with the history, let's fast forward several years to the here and now. In the great dumb terminal vs. PC war, the clear winner was the PC. As a matter of fact, as I was leaving the facility in the new millenium, they were replacing the dumb beige boxes with Windows based PC's (which a bunch of us promptly added some networked games to, but alas I digress). The power of the WWW was simply too much to resist, and as the applications got more and more complex, it was too much for the servers to handle, and it was better to offload some of the processing to the desktop.

However, now I see the trend reversing. Desktop pc's currently have tons of computing power. However, over 90% of users hardly use it for anything beyond email, word processing and the web. All of these pedestrian applications worked fine on 486 chips, and hardly take advantage of multicore processors that we've all flocked to. More and more, the internet hosts and runs the application. Many users use online document editors such as Zoho and Google Documents. Even more resource intensive tasks like file conversion are now easily done online with tools such as Zamzar. Finally, there are even plenty of sites that can do online video editing, a typically resource heavy task, and let's not forget about online photo editing as well. With all of this at our disposal, for the affordable price of free, installing software becomes much less of an issue, and is easier to justify for frequently used tasks.

With so much of this going on online, and not using the clock cycles of your PC, the network connection becomes far more important than the processor speed. Hence why users are gobbling up the faster speed connections as fast as fiber can get run to their home. In a way, the speed of the network can be as important a determinant of overall performance as is the speed of the computer. Needless to say, dialup is about as useful as that 386 desktop that was long ago placed curbside.

The current trend in phones is to shift the broadband network from a wired affair to a wireless one. This is the so called "third generation" network that gets discussed, and is becoming more commonplace here in America. Other initiatives include WiMax, and the recent wireless auction that may even provide a third pathway to the home for internet access over these potentially robust wireless networks. Finally, the groundwork is being laid for affordable access everywhere, all the time, and a move beyond WiFi with its purposely limited range that was never really designed for anything beyond a home router.

With these wireless broadband networks, the other half of the equation becomes the smartphone. Users are moving beyond moving their phone as only a voice communication device. Beyond even a dedicated text messaging platform, the possibilities are opening to have internet access everywhere, in a useful format. Sure, my Palm T/X could access the internet over WiFi, but the Blazer browser is quite limiting. With the option to have iPhone apps written by 3rd parties, expect to see some innovation there in the months ahead. With the network assuming greater importance, suddenly that underpowered smartphone, with a flash memory card for storage, is more than adequate as everything is really online anyway, and not local.

If things continue in the trend that many are guessing, than the next generation of smartphones, could very well be the seriously attractive reincarnation of those beige dumb terminals. Now if only they could make the data plans more affordable I'd be willing to jump on board. How many months on my T-Mobile contract again?

Jonas