[NTLUG:Discuss] to sum it up...things have come full circle.

[Steve Baker]

Richard Geoffrion wrote:
> 
> ok.. diskless workstations running off a central computer and all of this in
> a *nix environment.  We've some full circle. We went from the 'centralized'
> main frame days to the distributed PC days and now we are rapidly heading
> back towards those centralized days again.

I'm not sure that's true - the diskless option only really refers to where
your files are stored - in most office setups, people will be keeping their
files on a central file server - keeping your system software there as well
isn't *that* much of a change.

All of the actual *computing* still happens locally.  In the central
mainframe days, the terminals were truly dumb and all the processing
happened on the mainframe.  That was bad news because it didn't scale
well with the number of users.

Diskless Linux boxes are quite a different proposition.

> PS, as I spell check this message I added Linux to the dictionary.  Dang MS
> and their failure to include THAT technical term.. Geesh!

(Back in the days of PDP-11's when Unix spell checkers first appeared, the
UNIX v7 machine we had at college would try to correct the spelling of
"The UNIX operating system" to "The unisex operating system"...I always
thought it was pretty amusing that the system couldn't even spell it's
own name!  My theory for why we always had to say "The UNIX(tm) operating
system" was that this avoided the spell checker's little problem! :-)

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