The Thinclient in the Initial days was with Geode Processor with 8MB Flash and 16 MB of Memory.. the OS was basically of Embedded Linux and and WINCE and Embedded NT was yet to come in..These were the very initial days and the teams in India were just trying to learn the basics.. there are hardly any references available there for any issues and every thing had to be invented..
Many of the Government / Banking / Private customers were just started computerization or up gradating their older Green Terminals.. At this stage the for Thinclients the only solution available was based computing and the connectivity has to be only on LAN..
The issues related to Hardware were really serious - The Server Hardware really need to be very high.. and at that point of time even a 1GB Memory on a server is a luxury... the cost of of server was really high..
The connectivity of peripherals devices to the Thinclients and make them work with out any issues was really challenging.. there were different printers and configurations available.. (Serial / parallael etc..) then the customers wanted to connect few devices for scanning and other purposes.. basically through Serial..
Every time we meet up with the customers the following were the key questions asked;
1. What are all the applications need to run
2. What are all the peripherals need to be attached
3. Networking available or not (We are talking about LAN)
4. Any expertise on Server available or Not
and then whats the over all cost considering the Thinclient + Monitor + Server.. (The monitors were 14" CRT Monitors..)
To address this we come out with the different solutions like;
- Port mapping
- Port re-direction (Parallel / Serial)
- Drive mapping / Management etc.
Operating system was another challange - The new Server was Operating system based on Windows was a total new concept in India (Windows NT) and the terminal services on NT was altogether a new concept..
customers are not used to pay license fee just for a service (Terminal Services) and Terminal services by default doesnt support all functionalities discussed on the above.. hence more challange.. The other option available (easy option i would say) is to go with Citrix but then the cost of license was much higher than that of the Thinclient Hardware itself..
so with all these Technical challenges the vendors have launched Thinclients in India (VXL and followed by HCL)..
