Thursday 24 December 2015

Client and Server - Waves of the Past

Pardon me for the esoteric title. Just a small note from me to indicate what kind of movements we have had in the past, when it comes to client and server, or frontend and backend, or browser and server or what have you.








ClientServerTimecomments
-Mainframes1950ssingle-user
-Mainframes1960susers provide punchcards to system admins (batch-processing)
Dum terminalsMainframes1970stime-sharing, server does all the work1
Personal Computers-
1980sPCs in network sharing files/printers and do all the work
Personal ComputersServer
1990sPC is fat client and can do all the work, the start of client-server
Thin clientServer
1993Thin client does a little bit of work, but a lot is done on the server side
Internet BrowserServer1994Server does all the work, pushes HTML pages to client
PDAServer2000Basically the same concept as Thinclient, but discontinued.
Single Page Application in your Internet BrowserServer2005Browser does all the work, but queries servers.
Tablets and Mobile phonesMany Servers2010Basically the same concept as Thinclient, but distributed computing starts.

So, my question is always, what next? Will we see things of the Past come round again, where people come to the conclusion that Fat Clients are awesome?

The answer is probably that there will be cases where either fat or thin clients make sense. Especially in the plethora of new devices available nowadays.

References

[1] Wikipedia - Centralized computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralized_computing

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