| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Few modern-day events have changed as many people's lives — and as quickly — as the Internet. In just over five years, the Internet grew from a few hundred thousand host servers to 20 million hosts and 56 million clients. If this rate continues, by the year 2000 the network could consist of 100 million host servers — supporting 500 million clients. Whether or not it reaches the 100-million-host level by 2000, one thing is certain: the Internet is changing the ways that people think about communicating, and about computers. It's changing the ways system designers think about computers, too. Already, the newest evolutionary branch — the network computer, or thin client — is beginning to take shape. Soon, other Internet-specific products will emerge to fill a new and compelling market need for end-to-end information delivery systems that will make Internet access quick, easy and affordable for computer users and users-to-be around the world. The coming products — thin clients and servers — will be every bit as different from today's PCs and general-purpose servers as the Internet is from the proprietary networks of years ago. Contemporary PCs and network servers, ever bigger and faster, are cursed by the complexity that results from having to do too many things for too many different users. They are in a troublesome cycle, where increasingly complex software must be created in order to rationalize existing hardware architectures. General purpose computing will continue to thrive in many applications, of course. But for the Internet, new special-purpose devices will appear to take on the specialized tasks involved with information delivery and access. These devices will be characterized by appliance-like design and behavior. They will be single-function; inexpensive; simple to operate; and ultra reliable. Such devices — including thin clients and other specialized devices for user access, together with Internet server appliances such as high-speed web servers and network utility boxes supporting multi-client workgroups — will form an information-delivery infrastructure that will bring the benefits of Internet communications to users of all types.
For other interesting perspectives on Internet server appliances see the |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
