The desktop is no more. Come back to the days of DEC for a chat about emulators and the web.
Hey, Ipstenu!
Hey, buddy! Long time no see!
Everyone was busy, man. DST, your race, coding … it all eats at us.
Don’t I know it. What’s on your mind?
History.
Heavy, man.
Well, what’s a DEC terminal?
Crap. Um, DEC is a company, owned by HP these days. A terminal is, in that instance, a ‘dumb’ computer workstation.
That’s what I hear, but what does it mean?
A dumb– Okay, way back when I was a kid, my Dad set up an IBM server for Taffy’s, and from that everyone had a computer that could only go to that server for information.
What!? What about email? Surfing the net?
Dude, we’re talking 1970s. And, actually, this was the stuff that started the net. Old school BBS stuff where you dialed into a computer and posted.
Anyway, eventually people realized they needed some customization. People didn’t all think the same, so letting everyone have their own design of a computer, within reason, was a good idea. It also let you customize their software, so an accountant never had access to, say, cutting room designs.
Couldn’t they lock it down with access? Login as Bob, only see Bob’s stuff?
Sure, but software vendors started providing software, so you didn’t have to home grow everything. And eventually the DEC Terminal, and similar things, went away. Hard core folks used telnet to access a terminal server and do that stuff, but everyone else used a pretty GUI. Actually, I still use telnet a lot for what I do, because the GUI can get in the way. But not everyone thinks that way.
Makes sense. So everyone moved to desktops.
Until the paradigm shifted again, yeah.
Dude, I thought we agreed, no dork-speak. Explain this one?
*heh* Sorry, I was being a little facetious. Okay, so fast forward from 1990, with Windows 3.whatever and Mac OS 6 or 7, to Windows NT. Suddenly people had realized that computer users are idiots. Companies were spending more money on IT guys cleaning shit up from someone who ‘just opened a zip file from an email’ than developing tech and improving processes. The problem was obvious: people make stupid decisions. So the answer was to remove the ability to be stupid, from the general public.
NT, and later XP, allowed you to lock down computers so a general user could only work, while a developer could play. Sure, there were problems, but all told, they worked themselves out. You spent less time with little problems, and had more time to spend on the big problems. It cut down on viruses in the corporate world. Mac didn’t get good at this till OS X, sadly, but then they went Unix and … we all know Unix rocks.
You said it! But it sounds like they’re turning desktops into … dumb terminals.
That they are, buddy. Weird, ain’t it? A locked down desktop is becoming the dumb terminal. And that moves people and their personal software out to the web. Like this! Blogs, LiveJournals, Wikis, are becoming the place to go for software. This guy, Paul Graham says it best.
The Desktop is Dead?
Long live the internet!