Future Watch

July 1997 / Bits / Future Watch

Thin Is (Soon) In (NT)
Dave Andrews
The Windows environment is usually associated with "fat client" computing, but it looks like thin will be in, as in in NT. In a speech delivered at the recent Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft head Bill Gates acknowledged that the company is taking a hard look at Windows terminals. Customers want a thin client that is very simple, Gates said. And, he noted, putting a Web browser and operating system in a "true thin client" is a contradiction in terms.
At the time, what Gates hinted at sounded dangerously close to describing Citrix's WinFrame, which lets a network of clients run programs that reside on an NT server. In fact, Microsoft and Citrix have since announced a cross-licensing agreement in which Microsoft will use Citrix t echnology to add support for Windows terminals to a future version of NT. Microsoft says it will integrate thin terminal support into NT 5 and will retrofit it into NT 4 but won't say when until later this summer.
WinFrame clients are available for DOS, Windows, OS/2, the Mac, and different versions of Unix. Citrix's Intelligent Console Architecture intercepts Graphical Device Interface (GDI) calls and redirects them to the client. The client thus receives graphical representations of the applications that are executing remotely on the server; the client machine does not actually execute Windows or Windows applications itself.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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