Re: Mainframe & thin-client (was Re: Microsoft good press over Longhorn)
On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 01:15, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 01:14, cr wrote:
> > On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 23:37, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > > On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 05:13:01PM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> > > > Nah, that was EDIT.COM - before that appeared I used to use the Turbo
> > > > C editor to edit text files; I think the guys who wrote EDIT.COM did
> > > > too.
> > >
> > > I remember c:\dos\edit.com fondly as well, probably the best text
> > > editor to ever come out of MS. Still doesn't hold a flame to emacs,
> > > but hey, it's Microsoft we're talking about here, so what do you
> > > expect?
> >
> > Well, I discovered Edit when our department got a IBM PC with a
> > dot-matrix printer. At that time we engineers had to write
> > specifications on a mainframe terminal in some 'scripting' language, send
> > them off to some queue, phone up Accounts (who owned the mainframe) and
> > beg them nicely to run some compiler on it and send it to the Print
> > queue, then phone up Printing and tell them it was ours. If we were
> > lucky, next day, we'd get the result and (if we'd made no mistakes in our
> > scripting!) it would be readable. If not...
> >
> > Nobody told me about Edit, I found it by accident. But as soon as I saw
> > it I recognised The Future. Or, Freedom. I printed off one page to
> > prove to myself that it would work, went to the mainframe terminal,
> > logged in, typed "Change Password", shut my eyes and typed in random
> > letters, locking myself out of the detested mainframe forever. :)
> >
> > Does anyone wonder why I hate Thin Clients...? ;)
>
> I hate to use such strong words, but to compare the centralized
> control of resources that existed on *old* mainframes with the
> centralized control of resources on a thin-client/fat-server and
> find any but the most basic similarities is verging on delusion.
>
> After all, it's no more difficult to have a printer sitting on your
> desk, or down the hall with a TC/FS network-based system as it is
> when you have stand-alone or fat-client/thin-server system. And
> you're still running all the same apps, no matter what.
The *major* similarity between mainframes and Thin Clients is, that as a user
on a Thin Client, I am stuck with the software and the settings that are
installed on the Fat Server (or whatever it's called). Those are *not* the
same apps as I choose to run on my old W95 box, I can't install anything of
my own on the server. (I already asked that one, and I knew what the answer
would be. Mainframe Mentality is creeping back).
On 'my' (actually the company's) old W95 box, I have Opera, graphics viewers,
Xbasic, a pretty cool screensaver, heaps of other W95 freeware..... They're
the only things that make using a Windoze box tolerable, for me. It's about
freedom of choice, you know? Fortunately for me, I also have a considerable
number of little engineering programs installed which justifies me keeping my
old box.
Thin Clients might be suitable for copy typists, data entry clerks and Dumb
Users. Certainly not for engineers or anybody who's likely to be reading
this list. If we thought Microcrap was the greatest we wouldn't be on this
list, right?
cr
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