OK, I was prepping for next week's VS2005 launch event in Anaheim when an odd thought struck me. I was looking at this slide where Microsoft was defining what a 'Smart Client' application is (as opposed to a Thin Client or Fat Client application) and I realized that the term "Dumb Client" really had dropped from the technical vocabulary.
Now I'm sure that there are some high school age kids that will classify 'dumb client terminal' right up there with punch cards. I did a search for "dumb client terminal" and got a grand total of like 13 hits on google and like 3 hits of MSN Search. The fact is the days when people would buy a terminal with a modem and connect to a server that ran programs on the server and provided a text only interface are long gone and with them this term. By the way the definition of 'dumb client' meant that the client litterally had zero application processing locally. Only the UI bits are sent across the connection and keystrokes are sent down to the server for processing (every keystroke roundtrips on a dumb client and isn't even echoed to the screen until processed by the server.)
Now we talk about the 'thin client' - a browser or Remote Client Window (think Citrix) as the distributed solution, but even with a thin client the client has some level of processing - for example browsers have Java Script which requires a client processor. We don't think about solutions that relied on true 'dumb client' hardware. For example in a dumb client scenario even a solution based on Java Script would need to execute the Java Script on the mainframe server round-tripping the IO to the client.
Citrix is the closest thing to a dumb client, but of course to run it you need a PC or other fat client capable machine, because Citrix itself is a fat client application, you need a client with processing power to run it. Thus even the remaining dumb client emulator is a fat client. Apparently the old 90's argument that there would be a balance between the fat - smart - thin - dumb client applications has been safely decided... dumb clients are gone clients applications will always be at least thin clients moving forward - and with scripting even the thin clients are getting thicker so you can even see the trend line - heck most phones have more processing power then the old dumb client terminals, and even those mainframes that still run dumb client applications do so using a fat client based emulator...
