Being Fat may be costly proposition:

I am an IT engineering who did his MBA internship with a company who sells Thin Clients. It was a very unique   experience and we were amazed about potential. I have tried to compile the evolution of thin clients and history behind it in this blog post. This post is for beginners only and we will keep posting more in depth knowledge about Thin Clients in near future.

Mainframe Days:

To understand thin clients you need to take a step back in time to the days of the mainframe computer. In the early days of computing a user would have to use a dumb terminal to interface with the mainframe server to enter and receive data. They were called "dumb" because they had no real processing power of their own. All of the processing power was housed in the central mainframe and it would process all request from the users/terminals connected to it. Since no data was stored or processed by the "dumb" terminal, there was virtually no cost to maintain a terminal. A small team of computer professionals was all that was needed to keep everything running smoothly in this centralized computing model.

Distributed Computing Model:

In the late 1970's and the early 1980's the computing power was shifted to the desktop or "user" by companies like Microsoft® and Apple Computer®. This was a welcome change as it presented a lot more power to the user. As personal computers (PCs) became more powerful and operating systems more robust, the chore of maintaining the PCs quickly became a fulltime job. IT became its own department just to keep up with system patches, fight viruses, and support basic software upgrades. Companies were beginning to fight a distributed computing model.

Along with bringing great power and ease of use to the desktop, PCs also brought some unforeseen problems. Now users could exercise a great deal of control over their own workstations and when servers started to enter the workplace, those same users were able to share all manner of non-productive material across a corporate network.

Back to Centralize Computing:

It became obvious by the turn of the century that the time and expense of maintaining and securing PC networks in their current form was going to have to change. It was at this point that several companies starting producing workstation terminals called "thin clients". These low powered, inexpensive terminals were made to take advantage of a technology Microsoft called Terminal Services which allowed many users to run applications on a single Windows server. The technology pendulum was swinging back toward a more server-centric paradigm.