And this is a quote from Howard Rheingold:

> You have to remember that in democratic societies citizens talking with each other is very important. We've lost a lot of that with the mass media. Now we have an opportunity for citizens to create their own communications with each other. So when these big deals with the big companies and the big governments carve up this new territory, I feel it's very important that we keep a kind of "social green belt", that we keep the ability for citizens to talk amongst each other.

-- "The Computer Chronicles - The Internet (1993)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0&t=22m14s

A lot of thin clients came out in the 1990s and they were garbage. Web browsers are ridiculously inefficient (10x or more cycles to draw similar UI), yet thin clients had something like 1/10th the performance and 1/4th the RAM so the net performance would be 20x-100x worse than a PC for 1/4th the price.

WebTV was kind of an exception to this; it was very fast due to the split browser architecture and putting very little content on the screen. IMO their amazing engineering was wasted on the low end of the market.

VNC/Sun Ray was a much better idea, but only within a LAN.

What became TippingPoint put out an Internet Appliance similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

Also a good prediction for the crash in PC prices and the emergence of "webbooks"

Could this be what MS has in mind for the Xbox Series X?

Also the WebTV/MSN TV before it:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/MSN_TV

Very prescient iPad / smart phone prediction there.

Web appliances are a far cry from tablets and smartphones. Those are both basically the exact opposite of a web appliance. They're network connected and can store data remotely but they have significant client side power. They also have significant local storage, at least compared to web appliances.

The old web appliance concept was an extremely low powered device with no local storage. It had just enough power and storage to run a browser. The concept is more like a Chromebook/Chrometop than a tablet or smartphone.

The web appliance concept was predicated on some early to mid 90s assumptions about technology trends:

1. Storage was expensive so just burn everything into a ROM. Saving data wouldn't be a thing as you'd bookmark sites or post data to websites. 2. The Pentium (and associated support chips) was expensive and would stay expensive. 3. The web would basically consist of static images and text. Input would be done with POSTs from form controls. 4. The web wouldn't adopt any vendor specific technologies and plug-ins won't exist.

With these predicates some low powered RISC SoC running a browser would have been a decent appliance. WebTV and the Audrey weren't terrible products, they weren't great but also not terrible.

Yes, but still not seeing the forest for all the trees.

Yes, a phone has substantial computing power - compared to old technology. But is has nothing in storage or processing power against the data centers of Netflix, Facebook and Google. It's very thin in relative terms.

Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone. Granted, they use them but for inconsequential things like eye candy. Voice recognition and "your" social graph etc is on the remote server. It's almost like there is a law that nothing of importance must be computed on the local device.

> Indeed, even native apps go to almost comical lengths to not use the CPU on the phone.

This is needed in order to save battery life. But Netflix/FB/Google do not have "substantial" processing power per user. They're providing a centralized service to a very large userbase, and that comes with a requirement to economize on both compute and storage.

What I think is interesting is how the data that matters is on the server.

Besides, if you think about it, you make my argument for me - “they” have the power budget, the mobile device has not. Think holistically.

So a smartphone is like a web appliance because Google and Netflix run data centers? That doesn't make any damn sense. Consumer devices, PCs included, have always been outstripped in power and storage by data centers. That does not make them de facto thin clients.

Smartphones conserving power doesn't make them thin clients either. It just turns out that modern smartphone SoCs are vastly overpowered for many computing tasks. They scale core clocks very quickly and even have multiple execution cores tasked with different execution needs (BIG.little co figurations). Smartphones also have limitations larger systems don't have like lacking memory swap space and tight thermal envelopes. A modern smartphone is a minor miracle of computing for the amount of shit packed into a pocket sized device that runs all day on an internal battery.

Most mobile applications tether to some cloud component for synchronization. It's rarely because they can't do the work locally. Your camera app is doing tons of processing on the device to deliver decent pictures from very constrained optics and sensors. Google and Apple both do lots of ML on device and have dedicated co-processors for that task, iOS more so than Android. Games obviously do all their work locally. The bloated bullshit that is modern JavaScript web apps is all run locally even if data comes from a network. Many smartphones can record 4K 60fps video! Have you used a smartphone in the past decade?

No aspect of smartphones makes them any more thin clients than a full PC. They certainly don't resemble the 90s thin client/web appliance.

These could do virtually no work locally and had no local persistent storage. They were slightly upscaled X terminals. The web appliance concept would run a web browser little more capable than early Netscape browsers. What JavaScript found would be using "document.write" statements to do trivial client side things like display the current time or do image rollovers. There was very little CSS, no AJAX, no tabs, few even allowed multiple windows, no plugins, and no video.

Most didn't even support frames so you couldn't do frame/iframe reloading tricks to get new data from the server. It was all full page reloads with either GET or POST requests.

The original WebTV box was pretty much the expression of web appliance talked about in the article. It had a 100MHz RISC CPU with 2MB of RAM and 2MB of ROM. It had a tiny amount of Flash memory (1MB IIRC) to store downloaded e-mail and TV schedules. That was a fraction of the power of the typical PC of the same vintage and the gap only widened as the 90s went on.

So just because Google runs data centers doesn't mean an iPhone is a thin client terminal. Just because a device can browse the web does not make it equivalent to an old WebTV box.

It's a sensible prediction for a product developed and launched within a year of this memo being written and acquired by Microsoft within two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV

I'm thinking on a higher level - what we have is exactly that the data is on servers and that people do not have control over their own hardware.

And that the cheap hardware is good enough.

I'm not following how that's different from WebTV. The memo predicts a product like WebTV and that product materializes almost instantly. In the enterprise space, 'thin client' was already every second word out of Larry Ellison's mouth.

> When faced with the choice between a $500 box (RISC CPU, 4-8Mb RAM, no hard disk, …) and a $2KPentium/P6 Windows machine, the 2/3rds of homes that don’t have a PC may find the $500 machine pretty attractive!

WebTV wasn't the compelling product the author was concerned about. The open internet and more open hardware won then (to MS's benefit, for the author).

But the modern phone is that more compelling alternative.

The open internet winning was to Microsoft's detriment at the time, which was why they fought it so hard and why IE was so broken but difficult for corporate users to abandon. Microsoft wanted ActiveX to win.

There are a lot of things that turned out to be more compelling than WebTV but predicting WebTV doesn't make the author 'prescient' about them either. The claim was about the prescience not the compellingness.

The prescient bit to me was "the web could displace windows if it becomes full featured and there's a compelling alternative form factor to the PC."

Tons of people predicted webTv-like systems, but predicting MS losing power was much less common.

Ok but the comment I was responding it did not say that.

As to the MS thing, I'm not sure that's all that accurate either. It's certainly striking that someone wrote this and presented it at a high level within Microsoft when they did. But it also isn't that far from the way the future of the web was framed outside of Microsoft. If anything, it's a reminder of the outsized role Microsoft used to play just in 'mindshare'. A great deal of discussion about the internet and the web revolved around how it might affect Microsoft, how it might be an opening for (or not) for Microsoft competitors and how Microsoft would respond. I don't think either Google or Apple today loom quite as large in people's perceptions.

tbf loads of people predicted MS would lose power in the nineties. They just thought it would be due to desktop Linux

What the original author was worried about was a world where it was no longer the case that 99% of consumers had to pay OEM license fees to Microsoft to do these things. And by and large that came to pass - the web is a free platform.