London, where I am writing this, is now perhaps the global centre of the covid19 pandemic, thanks to a mutation of the virus that has allowed it to spread more easily. This mutation may not have come into existence in the South East of England but it has certainly taken hold here, and about 2% of London’s population currently have symptomatic covid.
In response all primary and secondary schools, which were due to open tomorrow, will be effectively closed and teaching will go online.
Suddenly the availability of computing resources has become very important – because unlike the Spring lockdown, where online teaching was (generally) pretty limited, this time around the clear intention is to deliver a full curriculum – and means one terminal per pupil. But even now how many homes have multiple computers capable of handling this? If you have two children between the ages of 5 and 18, and two adults working from home it is going to be a struggle for many.
Thus this could have been the moment that low cost diskless client devices came into their own – but (unless we classify mobile phones as such) they essentially don’t exist. The conditions for their use have never been better – wireless connections are the default means of connecting to the internet and connections are fast (those of us who used to use X/Windows over 28kbit dial-up think so anyway).
Why did it not happen? Perhaps because of the fall in storage costs? If the screen and processor costs haven’t fallen as fast as RAM and disk then thin clients get proportionally more expensive. Or perhaps it’s that even the fat clients are thin these days? If you have a £115 Chrome book then it’s probably not able to act realistically as a server in the way a laptop costing six times as much might.
But it’s also down to software choices and legacies. We live in the Unix age now – Android mobile phones and Mac OSX machines as well as Linux devices are all running some version of an operating system that was born out of an explicit desire to create an effective means to share time and resources across multiple users. But we are also still living in the Microsoft Windows era too – and although Windows has been able to support multiple simultaneous users for many years now, few people recognise that, and even fewer know how to activate it (especially as it has been marketed as an add-on and not the build in feature we see with Unix). We (as in the public at large) just don’t think in terms of getting a single, more powerful, device and running client machines on top of it – indeed most users run away at the very idea of even invoking a command line terminal so encouraging experimentation is also difficult.
Could this ever be fixed? Well, of course, the Chrome books are sort of thin clients but they tie us to the external provider and don’t liberate us to use our own resources (well not easily – there is a Linux under the covers though). Given the low cost of the cheapest Chrome books its hard to see how a challenger could make a true thin-client model work – though maybe a few educational establishments could lead the way – given pupils/students thin clients that connect to both local and central resources from the moment they are switched on?
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 