Re: [fw-wiz] Personal Firewall Day?

From: Crispin Cowan (crispin_at_immunix.com)
Date: 10/06/03

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    To: Christopher Hicks <chicks@chicks.net>
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 10:57:21 -0700

    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.

    Crispin 

    -- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.           http://immunix.com/~crispin/
Chief Scientist, Immunix       http://immunix.com
            http://www.immunix.com/shop/
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