In a move that it admits may not go down too well with some of its closest personal computer partners, Microsoft Corp is to offer its users the option of deferring costly personal computer upgrades or replacements through a new set of Zero Administration Client software services, known as Hydra and Darwin. And at the same time, Microsoft is proposing the thinnest of thin clients, a $500 Windows Terminal designed to replace so-called green screen dumb terminals. Hydra and Darwin will being added incrementally to Windows 95 and NT 4.0, with some early features appearing this week with its Zero Administration Kit (CI No 3,184). A full implementation of Hydra will ship in Windows NT 5.0, which goes to beta in the fall and will ship a year from now. It is designed to alleviate costly hardware upgrades and replacement programs by enabling users to run the latest Windows 9x and NT applications on their older 2Mb RAM 80386 boxes, as well as on NetPCs, DOS, Unix and Macintosh clients. Darwin, also supposed to ship with NT 5.0, will enable administrators to make distributed applications and services available to users. It will also stream frequently-used components into a local cache – the so-called ‘smart-caching’ technique which today’s web browsers already use – so that a user doesn’t have to wait for the same bitmaps to upload over and over again, and enables them to use application components when disconnected from the network. Users will make an offline tree of the services they want to cache. By mid-1998 Microsoft says, personal computer vendors will begin to ship the $500 Windows Terminals, which are aimed at the same markets as Network Computers. They are likely to include 4Mb each of ROM and RAM and a network interface card. Booting Windows CE locally, the devices will run applications stored remotely on servers, including Windows, Java and browsers using the Hydra multi-user extensions and remote access services for NT that Microsoft is creating from technology it has licensed from Citrix systems Inc and Groupe Prologue SA. Microsoft EVP Steve Ballmer says its ‘Windows-on-Windows’ and Windows Terminal strategies offer users more choices than NCs which in any case are not the thin clients they purport to be, requiring a boatload of memory and software to run browsers and Java applications locally. Sun, Oracle, IBM et al are simply trying to re-pursue the Unix myth, Ballmer says.
