The dream of diskless computers with limited onboard intelligence being served with applications over high bandwidth networks is nothing new. In fact, the thin client vision is very retro given that dumb terminals and centralised processing was where IT was at 25 years ago.

However, like retro fashion and retro rock music, every few years thin clients return to favour among a vocal sub-section of the IT user and vendor community. In the mid-1980s, it was X-Windows terminals, in the mid-1990s it was network computers (NCs), in the mid-2000s the new buzz-word is stateless computing (or stateless devices to be exact).

Championing the cause of stateless computing is a company undergoing somewhat of a revival at present. Wyse Technology was a Silicon Valley brand that was all the rage of the terminals era. Now the company, which has moved much of its operations to India, is making noises again about how the era of thin client and stateless computing is upon us.

According to Jeff McNaught, vice president of corporate strategy at Wyse, the big weaknesses of thin client computing network bandwidth and reliability limitations are fast disappearing. What’s more, the security issues and administrative overheads of fat clients with local storage are making thin clients an increasingly attractive alternative.

“No companies can deliver a secure device which can deliver a full range of applications,” says McNaught. “Fat clients have too much administration hassle.”

The answer, says McNaught, is to make thin clients stateless, with no data and no content, purely network driven devices.

“We can move the thin client market forward by making thin clients thinner than ever before,” he says. “With a stateless design, there is no data to upkeep and total security. With a stateless operating system, your identity is sent through the internet in real time.”

That’s all well and good, but as many of us know networks can often be slow and prone to going down. During such times, thin clients or stateless computers or what ever they happen to be called at any particular point in time become worthless bits of junk. McNaught argues that this is a scenario that is soon to disappear.

“Your telephone and TV are thin clients and nobody contests their reliability,” he says. “Computer networks are now much more reliable than in the past and there are a lot alternative routes aside from wired networks, there are wireless alternatives such as 802.11b and 3G. Servers have modern clustering technologies (that minimise downtime).”

McNaught makes no bones about it, as far as he’s concerned local storage has no future in his brave new world of stateless computing. “In the next couple of years, laptops will be stateless thin clients,” he says. “Stateless cell phones reduce the cost of the phones by 40% because flash ram is expensive. The end game is that there will be no more local storage.”

But if there’s no more local storage, how many of us would feel comfortable storing our valuable personal data on somebody else’s servers in some unknown location? “Do you mean like you do with your bank?” asks McNaught rhetorically.

McNaught may have a point. However, while his vision is coming to fruition, I’m personally glad that before the year is out I’ll be able to store my entire hard disk on a flash memory stick that I can carry on my key ring. Now that’s what I call being in charge of my own data.