Clusters, Servers, Thin Clients, and On-line Communities

Abstract

During the age of centralized processing and mainframes, terminals were dumb and networking was slow. A few simple networked applications emerged, such as simple games, email, and ‘talk’ programs. During the mid and late 80s, when I was beginning my Ph. D. in computer science at Indiana University, Unix desktop workstations and windowing interfaces became popular, and the dumb terminal was phased out. Naturally, networked games, email, and ‘talk’ programs became standard tools, and programmers started creating distributed client/server applications. In the business world, a similar push toward desktop (PC) computing created a new paradigm for computing, with word processing, accounting, and database management migrating to the desktop, and away from the main server.