Old becomes New

Today I received an email from a tech firm pushing a webcast about one of the current latest things in networking - centralized computing.

Learn how thin clients are simplifying corporate computing environments and helping companies deal more effectively with their IT security, management, and budgeting needs.

When I got into IT it was on an IBM midrange computer.  Each workstation was a "dumb terminal", the "network" was a more or less direct connection to the computer via twinax (if you don't know, you don't want to,) and all the computing was done on the System 34.  It was secure because it wasn't hooked up to anything else.

Then PCs started turning up with desktop modems, software and internet connections: EDP DP IS IT shops feared losing control of computing.  It's been a struggle, but we've made headway with proxies, firewalls and switches, got help and incentive from the spammers, hackers and even Senator Sarbanes and Congressman Oxley.

Now the advance of technology lets us give users dumb terminals thin clients, do all the work on a central computer server and any contact with the outside world has to go through us.

That was a close one.