Carl Tyler's Blog

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I was recently up on the SUN site, and came across some stuff written by Scott McNealy, he is still harping on about the power of NCs and Network Computers. I actually believe the reason IBM and SUN are all NCs and Portals etc. is not because customers are demanding this stuff, but it's the only way they believe they can wrestle control away from Microsoft. Over time my take to Network Computers has swung back and forth between are they good or bad ideas, overall I believe they are a good idea but I think they will be very different to the NCs that are promoted today, and also aren't the answer for every issue.

Most of the current NCs work in some way with a security card, or some other type of device that is holding your personal information, but they all have the limitation that they must in some way be connected back to the main office. I believe it is going to be a long long time until this model works throughout the world as Internet connections at the South Pole still aren't to great, and High Speed Satellite is still too awkward to setup, so I believe there is another model that will eventually succeed, and with devices getting smaller and smaller more and more possible. I envision that these cards they currently use will actually become cards that hold most of what is on a current PC, excluding the display device, input devices, network connectivity, power supply etc. and purely hold the processor, Data storage, memory and graphics adapter. With this model, you'd find your thin clients in different places in much the same way you find telephone kiosks today, or telephones in the back of plane seats. If they have network connections great your device would connect using the connection in the base station, if they don't then no issue as all the apps data etc reside on your local device. If you're going camping and know there wont be any base stations for you to plug into, then no problem, you can either buy the equivalent of a portable base station, or rent one. Getting the idea?

For this to happen would take an awful lot of agreement on the hardware vendors side, and the odds of that don't look good, maybe we should start an OpenSource hardware platform? Or maybe Intel will drive it forward with a new PC specification.