Here to there and back?

In 1984, Apple Computer portrayed corporate computer users as drones, numbed and brainwashed into mute compliance with a Big Brother-like ruler who shouted imprecations from on high. The aim was for the ruler to symbolize, in the computer hierarchy, the all-powerful mainframe. In Apple's narrative, the wretched souls could only be rescued by an athlete whose power, grace, and speed represented the PC, and, more specifically, the Macintosh. In any case, the image stuck. The PC wasn't a computer; it was a revolution.

Since then, if as an IS manager you weren't into PCs, you were a passive corporate slave and that was all there was to it. Client-server computing, where the PC under the direct control of the user held all the cards, was where things were at.

Another revolution, however, may be under way with the emergence of a breed of diskless PC alternatives called network computers. While the Internet has given a whole new purpose to these boxes, in many ways they look a lot like the so-called dumb terminals those corporate slaves used. Is it a nostalgic trip back to the future, or just a big marketing stunt to wrest away control from the new Big Brother in Redmond?

John Seeley, database administrator for the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell AFB, on "brilliant terminals"

Whatever it is, if it catches on it will mean at least a partial return to the kind of centralized, network-based computing that became pass? as soon as that Apple commercial aired. It turns out that a lot of IS managers just can't wait.

It's a tribute to the marketing might of Oracle and its allies that NCs are being portrayed as a breakthrough technology. In terms of basic schematics, a computing architecture built around NCs is just a flashier version of the old dumb terminals and mainframes where all the data and most of the processing power live on a computer that the user may never see and certainly can't touch.

"This is a new variation on an old concept, as far as having most of your resources centralized where they can be used efficiently," said John Seeley, a database administrator for the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. "I wouldn't call the NC a dumb terminal. You might want to call it a brilliant terminal because it's going to have a lot more computing power."

778K 799K Nelson Petracek, consultant with DBCorp, on how the NC is different

Nelson Petracek, a consultant with DBCorp, an information systems integration and consulting firm, said the NC is so improved it really is a new idea: "I see the NC as a completely new technology. It contains a lot more than a dumb terminal, in terms of the ability to access a lot more information worldwide. It [also] has a better user interface."