Today, I believe the push to terminals is due to the slow death of Moore's law. Computer performance today is not getting much faster, and it's certainly not growing at the exponential rate it was from the 1970s-2000s.
Previously, if you wanted to double your performance, you would just wait 18 months or so, and some manufacturer would provide it. Now, we don't have that luxury. If you want to double performance, you basically need to double the number of computers. Unfortunately, doing that takes up physical space and power. So the solution is to create massive server farms with big beefy computers that can run in parallel.
Today, I believe the push to terminals is due to the slow death of Moore's law. Computer performance today is not getting much faster, and it's certainly not growing at the exponential rate it was from the 1970s-2000s.
Previously, if you wanted to double your performance, you would just wait 18 months or so, and some manufacturer would provide it. Now, we don't have that luxury. If you want to double performance, you basically need to double the number of computers. Unfortunately, doing that takes up physical space and power. So the solution is to create massive server farms with big beefy computers that can run in parallel.
The death of Moore's law is depressing.