| Dumb Terminal by Chinnapong Saicholpitak
Dumb terminal was one of the most important traditional application architectures: working as terminal-host system. The term refers to its depending capacity to the host which in many case were a mainframe computer. Dump terminal was simply a stand-alone machine which fully relies on processing power of the connected host computer. The host machine in turn distributed I/O function back to terminal sites.
Though, terminal-host approach worked, especially with a limited-resource organization, the host computer was frequently overloaded and often resulted in slow response times. Because of the high volume traffic generated by this system and to reduce transmission costs, host usually sent limited detailed information to be shown onscreen. As I have observed application architecture over the years, I found it very interesting that we are somehow stepping backward in some of the architecture design. Thin client approach in Web application architecture shows a close similarity to terminalhost systems. Thin client presents security and distribution system in its simplicity but resulted as making the browser on the client becoming more like a dumb terminal.
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