What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2104

PCs, as they were promoted by IBM for business, were a giant leap sideways. They proliferated because they played better games than test-only terminals. If you look closely, many PCs in businesses have the primary function of a text terminal emulator.

There's sufficient bandwidth available (and there was enough available 20+ years ago for e.g. BLIT) to do only the UI processing at the user.

The real world gets in the way of distributed computing; except in very special cases. Not only is it a matter of moving data between computing nodes; there's also the small matter of trust.

Most PC hardware sits idle for 23.75 hours a day. For 0.20 hours a day it's working to propagate or fend off malware.

Business users only need a terminal; and are better served by a reasonably fast connection into a server where the server's resources can be better utilised and centrally managed by partially inept administrators instead of totally inept users.

If you haven't noticed; users don't care about the computer; until it stops doing what they need to do with it.

PCs do have a place; primarily in providing computing resources to unconnected users. They're also marginally "useful" for games.

Not surprising as the specialised hardware of the past now has equivalents of better available at a fraction of the cost in a "PC". -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign I'm a .signature virus! X against HTML mail Copy me into your ~-.signature and postings to help me spread!