Has anybody else noticed that we’ve come full circle twice?
In the beginning, there was the mainframe. And lo, it was big and fast and ran applications, and it used dumb terminals. They were very thin clients that served only as a presentation space.
Then, there was the first age of the microcomputer, and people wrote applications, and fat clients which spoke with back end servers to get data, but the application itself, ran on the local computer.
Then out of the depths, came the internet. The internet for whatever reason, created farms of servers which ran the bulk of the applications, and your [relatively] thin client just rendered the data.
A web browser is not a simple presentation space like a dumb terminal was, but it is also not a fat client. Yes systems load much javascript on to your local machine, but the application is still basically running on the server side.
And then, the android and the ios descended from the heavens, and now we have come full circle again. For all of those zillions of apps people are writing are in fact, fat clients for the new breed of computer everybody is buying up.
Boy I can’t imagine what’s going to come next…