The Return of the Dumb Terminal
Jim Harris in Books, Sponsored Blog Posts tagged Cloud, Enterprise CIO Forum, HP, Mobile Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 3:00AM This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.
In his book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly observed “computers are becoming ever more general-purpose machines as they swallow more and more functions. Entire occupations and their workers’ tools have been subsumed by the contraptions of computation and networks. You can no longer tell what a person does by looking at their workplace, because 90 percent of employees are using the same tool — a personal computer. Is that the desk of the CEO, the accountant, the designer, or the receptionist? This is amplified by cloud computing, where the actual work is done on the net as a whole and the tool at hand merely becomes a portal to the work. All portals have become the simplest possible window — a flat screen of some size.”
Although I am an advocate for cloud computing and cloud-based services, sometimes I can’t help but wonder if cloud computing is turning our personal computers back into that simplest of all possible windows that we called the dumb terminal.
Twenty years ago, at the beginning of my IT career, when I was a mainframe production support specialist, my employer gave me a dumb terminal to take home for connecting to the mainframe via my dial-up modem. Since I used it late at night when dealing with nightly production issues, the aptly nicknamed green machine (its entirely text-based display used bright green characters) would make my small apartment eerily glow green, which convinced my roommate and my neighbors that I was some kind of mad scientist performing unsanctioned midnight experiments with radioactive materials.
The dumb terminal was so-called because, when not connected to the mainframe, it was essentially a giant paperweight since it provided no offline functionality. Nowadays, our terminals (smartphones, tablets, and laptops) are smarter, but in some sense, with more functionality moving to the cloud, even though they provide varying degrees of offline functionality, our terminals get dumbed back down when they’re not connected to the web or a mobile network, because most of what we really need is online.
It can even be argued that smartphones and tablets were actually designed to be dumb terminals because they intentionally offer limited offline data storage and computing power, and are mostly based on a mobile-app-portal-to-the-cloud computing model, which is well-supported by the widespread availability of high-speed network connectivity options (broadband, mobile, Wi-Fi).
Laptops (and the dwindling number of desktops) are the last bastions of offline data storage and computing power. Moving more of those applications and data to the cloud would help eliminate redundant applications and duplicated data, and make it easier to use the right technology for a specific business problem. And if most of our personal computers were dumb terminals, then our smart people could concentrate more on the user experience aspects of business-enabling information technology.
Perhaps the return of the dumb terminal is a smart idea after all.
This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.
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Reader Comments (3)
Great post as ever Jim.
I'm a massive fan of cloud-based services, I think we're seeing a shift towards this model now in the Data Quality sector in particular and it's a very exciting time to be involved.
I think the days of the laborious on-premises software install are numbered and can't come soon enough in my eyes. As you say, I'd rather vendors figure out better ways to scale their services, update their user experience and offer more competitive value than force me to upgrade my PC every 12 months.
As I see it, the truly dumb terminal is not about to return. Rather, they are smart machines made to act dumb.
The cloud data store will succeed but it won't be fit for every conceivable purpose and you can bet users will find another purpose. They will either download data and fix it on their smart-but-dumb machine or duplicate data in their spreadsheet-in-the-cloud. Same old challenges in a new technology.
Dylan, I too look forward to saying goodbye to the nightmare that is the version compatibility matrix but I fear that even in the cloud we'll still hear "I'm sorry. You can't run this with that." Our dumb terminals will shrug their shoulders indicating their helplessness.
Never fear. The future generation will be dumb-and-smarter terminals with enough power to process locally and memory the size of a cloud. Who knows, after that we might see Lunar data storage? ("To infinity and beyond!" as Buzz Lightyear said.)
Well said, Jim. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to use this iPad I own now if I am out of network for an hour. Supposedly the coolest thing to own and a breakthrough innovation of this decade as some put it, it's nothing but a dumb terminal if I do not have 3G or WiFi connectivity.
Putting most of my documents, notes, to-do’s, and bookmarked blogs for reading later (e.g., instapaper) in the cloud, I am sure to avoid duplicating data and eliminate installing redundant applications. (Oops! I mean the apps! :) )
With cloud-based MDM and Data Quality tools starting to linger, I can’t wait to explore and utilize the advantages these “return of dumb terminals” bring to our enterprise information management field.