Lizette Koehler wrote:
Multiple users were capable of accessing a central computer through dumb terminals, whose only function was to provide access to the mainframe.
"A Conversation with Michael Cowlishaw", Dr. Dobb's Journal, March 1, 1996 http://www.drdobbs.com/a-conversation-with-michael-cowlishaw/184409842 "I suspect in ten years you may not be able to easily draw a distinction between what's a mainframe and what's not. I've been wishing for some years that someone would take the mechanics of a PC, which belch out heat and noise, and put them in a room miles away from where people are sitting, so that all you'd have on your desk would be the input and output devices you need. "That's essentially what the mainframes gave you, in that they consolidated the disk drives and the power supplies and the central processing units in one place and people had something very simple on their desks. "I'm not the first to point it out, but the World Wide Web browsers of today are effectively dumb terminals" - Michael Cowlishaw -- Jack J. Woehr # Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of www.well.com/~jax # thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe www.softwoehr.com # with a fine understanding of human fallibility. - Carl Sagan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
