sea of confusion are hand-held PCs, TV set-top boxes (e.g., WebTV), and even managed PCs, all taking on many of the concepts of thin clients.
In addition, NCs have proved to be more difficult to design, produce, and implement than many of their proponents first thought. Oracle-compatible NCs are just now reaching the market, and Sun Microsystems has only recently started shipping its JavaStations in volume. Reality has also stepped in with regard to the heavy reliance on Java, as Corel's abandonment of its Java office program demonstrates.
Still, these thin clients are becoming
a reality. And they can provide some real benefits, albeit with more caveats than originally thought.
Thin-Client Alphabet Soup
To help you sort through the NC confusion, we rounded up and tested nine
prototype units
from AST, Boundless, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, NCD, NEC, Neoware, Tektronix, and Wyse. Things are changing so fast that while we were acquiring systems to test, two manufacturers indefinitely postponed their NetPCs. Citing tepid customer response, IBM and Digital Equipment both suspended their NetPC rollouts. And at press time, some of the original NC proponents (Apple, IBM, Oracle, and Sun) had not yet shipped even their first-generation Java-based NCs to customers in the U.S. (beyond their existing beta tests). Their second-generation Java products were not ready in time for our tests, although IBM and Sun said their Java boxes will ship soon after this article sees print. This demonstrates just how difficult these vendors have found it to deliver practical N
Cs.
Defining the Field
NC opponents say the NC is virtually useless -- that it runs few applications and is a throwback to dumb terminals. Connectivity costs, they say, will negate an NC's lower administration costs and low price tag. They also worry that NCs will generate huge amounts of network traffic, swamping all but the fastest asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks.
Despite these criticisms, many companies with existing high-speed networks, already-low administrative costs, and employees who require single-task computers have deployed NCs and are reaping the benefits of lower administration costs. They are likely deploying one of two types of devices currently on the market, which are based on either the NetPC specification or the NC1 Reference Profile. We asked vendors to send us NCs based on these two most widely used specifications.
The NetPC spec is a reference-profile specification for a low-maintenance PC system built with the network in mind. The initiative was deve
loped by Intel, Microsoft, and other PC manufacturers, including Compaq, Dell, Digital,Gateway, and HP (
see the chart
).
The NC1 Reference Profile, which was originally defined by Apple, IBM, Netscape, Oracle, and Sun, is the minimum set of hardware requirements and network protocols that must be supported for any device to be branded an NC. In practice, the NC1 category also includes Java terminals and thin Windows clients based on Citrix's WinFrame technology, soon to be known as Hydra.
For the most part, NC1s are super-fancy X Window System terminals, while NetPCs are just stripped-down PCs. (Eventually, regular PCs will have all the features of NetPCs.) Specifically, what makes NC1s different from NetPCs is their new server technologies, which support Java, multiuser functions, and more management. For example, new Windows NT user-profile and policy-management features make NetPCs much more manageable than ever.
In many respects, NC1s and NetPCs fill the same niche a
nd can handle many of the same tasks. For example, Windows applications can be accessed on an NC1 using Winframe derivatives. But the real technology innovations with thin clients have as much to do with what's going on in the server as they have to do with what's happening on the client.
For our tests, however, we chose to focus on the client. We asked vendors to send us NetPCs with 100-MHz or faster Pentium processors, 16 MB of RAM, an internal hard disk (for caching support), 10Base-T Ethernet support, and an SVGA-compatible display adapter supporting resolutions of at least 1024 by 768 pixels. We also asked that each client be capable of booting and attaching to an NT server and that it include any boot-up, networking, and router software that might be necessary for it to run under NT.
NC1s needed a VGA-compatible display adapter with 1024 by 768 resolution, 16 MB of RAM, and 10Base-T Ethernet. They also had to have a Web browser with Java capability and connectivity software for either NT or
Sun Ultra (Solaris).
Contributors
Steve Platt
, NSTL Managing Editor
Dorothy Hudson
, NSTL Project Manager
Maryanne Eves
, NSTL Acquisitions Editor
Michelle Campanale
, BYTE Technical Editor
Linda Higgins
, BYTE Editorial Associate
Back to the Future with 9 Network Computers
