NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part1/4270

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 1.7 KB

Path: in1.uu.net!telepath!amigat!tjones
From: [e-mail] (Tom Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Why not Wal-Mart or Sears!!!
Distribution: world
X-BBS-Software: EXCELSIOR! BBS v1.21j
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 4 Feb 96 17:16:03 CST
Organization: Amiga Tribe Public BBS [phone]



> I'm hearing now is excitement over so-called $500 (US) dumb terminals to
> access the internet in the near future.

You are referring to the announcements at ComDex by Novell primarily? That
was given a trashing and a cold shower by Lan Times, the major organ of the
networking community. The idea was pretty much a diskless workstation that
depends on downloading everything it needs from the servers after booting,
which amounts to a modern equivilant of the old captive dumb terminal like
the VT220. The networking administrators almost unanimously saw it as an
attempt to set everything they had tried to accomplish for 10 years back to
1986 and rejected it out of hand. As a CNE for Wang I agree with them, this
may be cheap but think what a couple hundred of these will do to network
throughput at a local level, not to mention what it could do the the internet
if it became commonplace. It would only work if our nets had bandwidths only
dreamed of today. The only upside of such a system that I know of would be
that it makes for great security since the user is shackled to the max. There
is something to be said for central control of application revisions and
updates by the admin without bothering the users too I think. Someday.

Tom


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