From: "Ed Carp" <ecarp@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 00:13:40 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: The future will be easy to use (fwd)
Message-ID: <199511281653.KAA23530@khijol>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> To:            stevenw@best.com (Steven Weller)
> Cc:            cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject:       Re: The future will be easy to use (fwd) 
> Reply-to:      perry@piermont.com
> Date:          Tue, 28 Nov 1995 08:29:10 -0500
> From:          "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>

> 
> Steven Weller writes:
> > >Realisticaly, who in their right mind would buy a diskless workstation to
> > >connect to Internet?
> > 
> > The same sort of things could be said of the telephone compared with
> > written correspondence. Why would anyone have one in their business or
> > home? Anyone can overhear a conversation, people will just chat, the only
> > thing you can do with it is talk, there is no record of the correspondence,
> > why would anyone want to talk to people on the other side of town? etc.
> 
> This is different. In an era of distributed processing, they are
> returning you to the mainframe model. I don't see that this can work
> very well. Considering how much more powerful a $1000 machine is, why
> would you want something half that price that can do one hundredth as
> much for you?

I beg to differ.  Even though Larry Ellison's idea is silly, I don't 
see it as returning us to the mainframe model.  Rather, I see it as 
just a small step backwards.  Right now, I've got a 486/DX2-66 with a 
paltry 50 MB HD on my desk at work.  Most of its processing is done 
loading stuff off the LAN and running it locally.  The fact that I 
have a local disk nakes not the slightest bit of difference except a 
boot-time.

If the diskless workstation were to have *no* intelligence 
whatsoever, I'd agree with you.

As to diskless workstations being of no value, again, I'd have to 
disagree.  Diskless workstations, expecially X terminals that have a 
little NVRAM in them, have been rather popular for several years as a 
way to get graphical objects onto people's desks without having to 
shell out a ton of money in the process.  The only reason that 
they're getting less popular is that PC prices have fallen 
dramatically for the past several years, so much so that it's 
cost-effective to put a DX2-66 with 8 MB of RAM and a little disk (or 
no disk at all) on someone's desktop as opposed to something from 
Network General.

Me, I'm waiting for the day that someone gets clever and puts Linux 
into ROM. :)  Java is starting to get really hot, so much so that I 
was telling my spouse that if she wanted to learn Java, she'd have 
steady contracts in the next year or so, even in the sticks of Dallas 
;)  The point is, the market for a cheap, fast PC that will run 
applets *is* there, or will be soon.

I only hope that they make it upgradeable, so *I* can put that 5 GB 
array on it, and beef up the memory without having to take a second 
mortgage to do it.