On Monday 14 November 2005 12:47 pm, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 00:51 -0500, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
On Sunday 13 November 2005 11:59 pm, Anders Johansson wrote:
Client/Server has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. That design concept was around before Microsoft and has nothing to do with desktops or anything else in this discussion.
I disagree. The traditional concept of client/server was desktop client/{file,database} server.
I really have no idea where you got that notion. client/server has always been a concept of communication between programs and division of duties/encapsulation, and never ever about desktop computing.
For one, from working with Novell NetWare Networks in the early '90s. I just checked my textbooks form college. The text I used in my MIS cakewalk, ur...uh..., I mean to say course, data from 1991, gives the definition of a client running on one box and server on another. The textbook I used for my network management course, dated 1994, uses the definition that Microsoft made popular with the introduction of NT. See Helen Custer's _Inside Windows NT_, dated 1992.
That is exactly what Microsoft decoupled. A file server became a file service.
I don't understand where you draw the distinction. Please note that a server, technically, is not a machine, it is a process running on a machine. Some people call it a service, some call it a daemon, whatever. It's been around since the mainframe. More or less the only thing that has changed since then is how the client and server processes communicate
But in the age of Wyse Terminals, mainframes, and mini-computers, there was a mental division between "the server" and "the clients" which typically meant clients (hardware) being very limited in processing capacity in comparison to servers (hardware).
The only, and I mean only, thing Microsoft "invented" in this respect was putting a desktop GUI on a machine running server processes, and I'm not altogether certain that was a laudable thing
Laudable or not, it was a marketable thing. It actually started with Windows for Workgroups 3.11. That's back when Novell were still the bigboys in the LAN server OS market. I built dozens of Novell servers, both hardware, and installation. I also built thousands of PCs to go along with them. Most of these PCs didn't even have harddrives. They booted from the network using a boot PROM, and loaded the entire OS from the Novell NetWare server.
Nonetheless, I suspect the percentage of secrataries or other admin personnel using Linux as their primary workstation is very low.
Of course, but your windows FUD is wrong nevertheless. It has been shown to be usable by non-technical personell. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but usable to the point of indifference by people using it only as an office tool managed by others
And then I went to work for a contractor at the US DoD, Defense Information Systems Agency, Operations Process Improvement Office....