networking A simple
client program or hardware device
which relies on most of the function of the system being in
Gopher clients, for example, are very thin; they are
stateless and are not required to know how to interpret and
display objects much more complex than menus and plain text.
Gopher servers, on the other hand, can search
databases and
By the mid-1990s, the model of decentralised computing where
each user has his own full-featured and independent
"fat clients", often providing everything except some file
storage and printing locally.
By 1996, reintroduction of thin clients is being proposed,
maintenance: with fat clients, especially those suffering from
to mean having to physically go to every user's workstation to
install the application, or having to modify client-side
configuration options; whereas with thin clients the
maintenance tasks are centralised on the server and so need
only be done once.
Also, by virtue of their simplicity, thin clients generally
have fewer hardware demands, and are less open to being
screwed up by ambitious
lusers.
and combined it with
Windows NT version 4 to allow thin
clients (either hardware or software) to communicate with
decades before.
(1999-02-01)