When i started my career more than a couple of decades back, we had "dumb" terminals to do our work on. The "Tele Video" and "Wyse" terminals that worked out of main frame computers had florescent green displays that flashed text characters on the screen. These were nothing more than a video display unit with key board and an RS232 port! Ine could just switch them on, bring them to life with a few key strokes and log on to the main system. After having completed the work, one had to just sign off and switch off! Life was simple! Then, Personal cimputers took over the world.

The first PC's that i worked on were slow bulky monsters costing the earth and with not more than 4MB memory. With intelligence getting bundled at the desktop, central computing architecture slowly gave way to peer to peer computing. The computer shifted from data centers to our tables and our PC's became fater and faster. More power ar the desktop-that has been the mantra! Almost a decade ago, we heard the phrase "Network Computer". In the 1999 ITU show at Geneva, 'Network is the Computer' was the main rhetoric of a major server manufacturing company, predicting the death of the fat Wintel PCs. However, the attempt to introduce thin client ( or client server) architecture met with a mixed success at best, even though it purported to improve both IT performance and security. The PC's kept on becoming fatter and more powerful, moving to the gigahertz range with half a gig memory as standard feature.

A significant new trends is now setting in, even though with a difference, in the thin client architecture. This is based on the new blade architecture. As the name suggest, the chassis can accommodate multiple single board ( and multi processor) computers, which can be hot swapped and hot backed up. This technology makes things extremely cost effective and space efficient and our data center managers are already feeling the heat in trying and space efficient and our data center managers are already feeling the heat in trying to cool these monsters. The new techniques of virtualization allows these servers to be micro-partitioned to run different applications and instances of operating system. The end result of this is that the desktop hardware required for this backend horse power may not be more than a high resolution display terminal! (Incidentally, the blade architecture is also encroaching into the PC space! One manufacturer fits up to eight single board PC's into one chassis(Typically kept in safe and secure IT closet) and provide only monitor, keyboard and mouse to the users,some times situated more than 600 feet away!). The question now is that will this actually come around full circle? Will we go back to working on thin and dumb terminals again? The answer this time around is yes -it may actually happen.The clustering and virtualization technologies bring almost 100% uptimes since applications are no longer tied to any hardware and can move from one virtual server to another in a cluster. In addition, the cost effectiveness of the hosted desk top environment both at the server and client end will cause many pragmatic companies to embrace them.

More over,Internet based high performance network will also encourage remote and mobile workers to connect through no frills terminals including hand held devices! The network may actually become the computer and the desktop may again become a dumb terminal. Who says that the world is not round?