Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 10:23:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Sean Eric Fagan <sef@kithrup.com> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Network Computers Message-ID: <199809211723.KAA17886@kithrup.com> In-Reply-To: <xzpn27tobrd.fsf.kithrup.freebsd.chat@urdarbrunni.ifi.uio.no> References: Mike Smith's message of "Mon, 21 Sep 1998 01:21:18 -0700"
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In article <xzpn27tobrd.fsf.kithrup.freebsd.chat@urdarbrunni.ifi.uio.no> you write: >I'll rephrase Jason's question: how does an NC differ from a diskless >workstation? To me, the entire NC concept sounds very much like >reinventing some kind of wheel. The original concept of "NC" was not necessarily diskless -- it might be, to save costs, but it might have a disk to speed things up. The big push for the "network computer" was because it costs a hell of a lot of money to maintain and upgrade thousands of computers. Most of this maintainence and upgrading is with the software. So someone thought, Wouldn't it be nifty if the software could be upgraded in one central location, and then all of the computers in the company would automatically pick it up? The easiest way to do that, of course, is with something like an X Terminal. The next step up (doing local processing) would be a diskless workstation. Both of these ahve been done before, and aren't terribly exciting. But the step above that -- which hasn't started to materialize, and I am afraid it may be abandoned -- would be something that is essentially a normal computer (PC, Mac, unix system, whatever) which periodically checked the "central server," and, if there was some new versions of the software there, would pick those up and install them. (There are a bunch of things this requires which I am just going to ignore for the moment.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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