Thin clients were promoted a few years ago as an inexpensive way to computerize businesses, but most companies realized that their employees wanted their own PCs configured to their own needs. While thin clients were not successful in business environments, thin client networks may be an ideal solution for academic and school libraries. Thin Clients Defined Thin client networking is based on the principle of centralized computing. Computing power, storage, applications, and data are housed on a central computer server. Thin clients are similar to PCs in appearance, but are clearly different from PCs at the technical level.
Application software is housed on the server, through which the Internet is routed.
Thin client devices are smaller than a normal desktop PC and contain fewer parts. There are two very different types of thin client networks. Sun leads the market with a product called the JavaStation. They are most often connected to the network via an Ethernet port, although token ring can support this configuration also. A typical JavaStation is configured with 32 MB of RAM in order to support the requirements of the processing the downloaded operating system and applications from the server.