The basis for the interest in NCC, from both the consumer and the vendor perspectives, was discussed. This is especially true if staff arbitrarily install software and hardware on their machines. Another motivation is that PCs rapidly become obsolete, sometimes in as little as 18 months. The underlying principle behind NCC is a distributed environment where applications and data are downloaded from network servers on an as-needed basis. This is similar to the mainframe era, except that applications are downloaded and then run locally.
Thin clients come in a variety of guises.
A third class of thin clients is the Windows-based NetPC, which may also support Java. The developments in NCs and the NetPC are rapidly progressing. Another option being pursued by several vendors is gearing a network computer to run other user interface sessions. For example, Insignia's NTrigue Client for Java allows you to run an NT session inside a Java applet. With a NetPC, you can run Java in a browser or directly in the operating system.