In the great days of the mainframe, users were given things called "dumb terminals" or "slaves". This summed up not only the devices but also the typical IT department's attitude to its users.
Some people would like to see those days return. They imagine a world where centralised computer power is supplied "on tap" like water or electricity. This is benevolent despotism: the system does what people want, and it never fails - two things that distinguish it from every other computer in the known universe.
Reality, however, is heading rapidly in the opposite direction. Google and other giant websites are not run on mainframes but on clusters or networks of PC-type servers running Linux/Unix or a variant of Windows NT, and the future is something like grid computing.
Also, hardly anybody still uses dumb terminals. Most have been replaced by "thin clients" or "network computers", and these undoubtedly have important uses. I'm not against them. But as a matter of observation, thin clients are getting fatter all the time. Even the classical thin client, the old black Bakelite phone, has largely given way to mobile models that often have microprocessors, screens and operating systems. If phones and TV sets are still "thin", they are fatter than they used to be.
There's a network side to this story. More than a decade ago, futurist George Gilder wrote in Forbes ASAP magazine: "In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb."
Phone companies like smart networks, partly because they can charge high prices for them. Unfortunately, they are expensive to build, inflexible, hard to run and take five or 10 years to upgrade. What we really need are stupid networks, like the internet.
This idea has been expounded for the past five years by David Isenberg, who wrote a paper, The Rise of the Stupid Network, while still a researcher at AT&T Labs. Now he's an independent consultant, and he spoke at last month's O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara.
In Isenberg's view, a smart network controls everything, and tells data where to go. In a dumb network, the data tells the network where it is going. All the network has to do is deliver it.
With a dumb network like the internet, you can send low quality voice, high quality voice, streaming video or whatever you like. You don't have to get the phone company's permission, and it does not need to upgrade its switches.
With a dumb network and smart clients, anybody can offer a new service, basically by putting the software on their server for everyone to download. Examples include ICQ instant messaging, Hotmail, Real Audio and Napster.
Smart clients/dumb networks are the key to rapid progress. And if you think users are too dumb to use smart terminals, tough. Most "user errors" are the result of badly designed systems with poor user interfaces, and inadequate training.
Links David Eisenberg
www.isen.com
www.isen.com
<A HREF="http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html"
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