Sort of? I don't disagree but this shift of locus for compute from the datacenter to the edge and back again is kind of like a pulsing heartbeat if you stick around long enough.
Mainframe -> form based terminals
Minicomputers (multiple servers) -> Terminals with flexibility in their formatting
Personal computers (combined terminal + compute)
Server farms (lots of servers) -> Thin X servers / Citrix style clients
Server farms (lots of servers) -> Web Browser (software implementation of a terminal with very flexible formatting)
Surprisingly, I wrote about it in BYTE Magazine back in the day (like in 1984) about how "intelligence" (which was code for programmability) in remote nodes lead to a separation of computation and presentation. There is a tremendous bandwidth advantage if you do it this way (sending text is less bandwidth than sending bitmaps or compressed video streams).
Exactly! I've been around long enough to experience that series of events from top to bottom.
That's the weird thing about this business. There's always a new generation saying 'this is dumb, we should do it differently' and things bounce back and forth.
As you say, smart terminals are one reason why an old mainframe could support so many users with so few resources - all that display and input processing offloaded in a very distributed fashion.
Mainframe -> form based terminals
Minicomputers (multiple servers) -> Terminals with flexibility in their formatting
Personal computers (combined terminal + compute)
Server farms (lots of servers) -> Thin X servers / Citrix style clients
Server farms (lots of servers) -> Web Browser (software implementation of a terminal with very flexible formatting)
Surprisingly, I wrote about it in BYTE Magazine back in the day (like in 1984) about how "intelligence" (which was code for programmability) in remote nodes lead to a separation of computation and presentation. There is a tremendous bandwidth advantage if you do it this way (sending text is less bandwidth than sending bitmaps or compressed video streams).