The end of the desktop?

~misfit~ wrote:
Somewhere on teh intarwebs "BillW50" typed:
In ,
~misfit~ typed on Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:41:20 +1300:
[...]
Frankly I'm surprised that someone like Bill who claims to have been
"in computers" for 34 years would confuse a thin client with a thin
laptop.
That is because way back when we called this technology as a terminal
Shaun.

Yeah, I know that it can be refered to as a terminal. However, you stated
that you'd been "in computers since '74", suggesting continuity, that you
were still in the industry. Therefore you should be very familiar with the
term 'thin client' as it was a big buzz in the industry for a while at the
end of the 90s, with machines like Compaq's iPaq, which could act as a (very
underpowered) workstation or as a decent thin client.

Keep in mind that not everyone has the same skill set or experience. I
started working with computers when I went to work for IBM in 1965 (yes,
Virginia, they had computers then). I spent my almost 40 year career
working with IBM mainframe computers and was busy in the late 90's
prepping for the Y2K rollover. The trade press was all atwitter about
thin clients then as it was about "client/server" in the early 90's, all
very Shakespearean, i.e., a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.