I got to thinking today about the mainframe and minicomputer environments that I worked with in college and in my first few years as a practicing IT consultant. And it occurred to me that maybe that model is not such a bad one. There are lots of challenges that we face in a modern Windows environment that were just not an issue on (say) the DEC VAX.
In the mainframe model, you have all the benefits of centralizing your computer horsepower in one place: easier administration, easier software updates, easier troubleshooting, easier monitoring, ability to afford more expensive peripherals, etc. And you have a far more secure environment. How much time do we spend dealing with anti-malware, anti-spyware, and anti-virus efforts? And with today’s faster networking technologies, bandwidth to “dumb” terminals would not be much of an issue.
With all the overhead and vulnerabilities associated with Windows, would we be better off running dumb terminals and returning to the mainframe model? I’m not saying you go back in time completely. You could still take advantage of virtual computing on the server side, for example. But doing away with local storage (both hard disk and optical) and going with a much simpler client environment has a lot of appeal. In fact, for 90% of what most people do with computers at work, I’m not even sure a graphical display is necessary. We put men on the moon without the benefit of the “desktop metaphor.” And Microsoft Word still isn’t as intuitive or as reliable as WPS-Plus on the VAX was, thirty years ago.
Workstations have become incredibly bloated and IT admin costs are through the roof. Windows is this huge unwieldy beast that nobody fully understands and that has become an expensive headache generator for many companies. Who has time to learn 3500 Group Policy settings? Thoreau said “simplify, simplify.” Perhaps a major rethinking of the predominant office computer architecture is called for. Maybe even an IT revolution. What do you think?
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