Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

lol i remember at the school district i worked at, someone had the idea to save a bundle of money by doing thin clients in most of the computer labs. "it's great, these kids are just doing word documents and web-browsing!" i think this was shortly before dual-core chips were a thing. i seem to recall the main terminal server being a blade chassis comprising six blades of dual-socket late-model Pentium III chips. think there was also a four-socket server that got deployed somewhere. basically like 20 terminals per CPU.

then Flash got really popular, so a couple of sessions with Flash-heavy webpages could bring a whole lab to a grinding halt. so the easy solution is just to block Flash, right? well, the textbook publishers started including links to 'enhanced content' or whatever that - surprise! - relied on Flash. ultimately everyone wound up hating the thin clients and we wound up going back to regular PCs for everyone.



i'd be curious how well it'd work today with the monster number of cores you can pack into a server. on the other hand i think they're just doing chromebooks and ipads for everyone now anyway.