Indeed, the best market for pure Windowless NCs seems to lie in replacing mainframe terminals, or in those few sectors where good commercial Java software exists.
But in addition to the predominance of desktop PC's at most modern business, as opposed to the few, closely guarded mainframe terminals of yesteryear, there is at least one other key difference: in hiring an application provider, the customer is paying for the knowledge and skill of the supplier, not simply the software and server computers.
In the meantime, a host of other companies, from makers of fancy mainframe terminals to PC manufacturers, have begun selling machines that offer many of the NC's advantages, such as easier maintenance.This has led to confusion about what a NC is (does a NetPC running Microsoft software count?), and probably closed much of the corporate market to Oracle's machines.
Only IBM, which claims to have shipped 10,000 of its Network Station NCs, is making much of a dent in the market, and most of these machines are replacing IBM's own mainframe terminals, not PCs.As the NC pioneers have delayed, the idea of what an NC is has become increasingly blurred.
A 2010 report for BCG, a consultancy, drew a parallel with the switch from mainframes and terminals to cloud storage and the internet.Traditional power stations and grids still play a role in this world, but not a dominant one.
This paper briefly traces the evolution of information system architectures from mainframe-connected terminals to distributed multi-tier architectures.
Most clearing services ran mainframes and terminal-based UIs that aren't built for the pace of startup innovation.
Pritt created a program, called Extra, that turns a PC's screen into a facsimile of the mainframe's old terminal.
It was tantamount to bringing back the mainframe with dumb terminals, but instead of a costly mainframe, you had a pool of resources available from an off-the-shelf PC network, which presumably would be much cheaper and easier to operate.
It then moved on to mainframe circuit-boards and terminals and eventually to personal computers.
