It will bring multi-platform access, with, for example, compatibility between Apple Macintoshes and Unix PCs. Common Graphical User Interfaces, using HTML, will help in this respect. The mainframe operating environment still predominates, with investment locked in and legacy systems which change very little, if at all, over very long periods. In regard to performance, most mainframes have problems coping with more than a very few hundred on-line users and the prospect of thousands of users simultaneously logged on would not appear to be practical. The problems of security, with open access, are obvious and somewhat formidable.
Solutions are at hand, however.
Rather than attempt the daunting task of conversion, the legacy data can be filtered and interpreted when necessary. With respect to performance, it is expectations rather than actual response time which are important and these are currently being set by the Internet, where delays of five or six seconds are tolerated. Interpretive servers, also, make users feel comfortable by providing familiarity. Whether the Web is the ultimate destination of information technology or not remains to be seen, but taking advantage of it now in administrative computing is at the very least an astute interim strategy. It may well be - as happened at Princeton in December 1995 that the biggest problem will be in selecting the application with which to start the process.