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On second thought... After weighing both cost and speed, network computing no longer seems quite so silly

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 07/11/96

A couple of weeks ago, I mocked the "network computer" dream so avidly promoted by companies like Oracle and Sun Microsystems. And from my readers, I heard not a peep of dissent. You just can't see yourselves buying some stripped-down computer, devoid of software, and then paying a fee to download a word processor from the Internet every time your kid wants to type a book report.

But even if we don't buy them, I bet a lot of our bosses will. A week spent playing with the latest Java software has persuaded me that network computers will pop up on many a corporate desktop in the next couple of years.

Java, of course, is everyone's favorite computer language these days. Devised by Sun Microsystems and originally intended to control television sets in the age of interactive TV, Java allows programmers to write code that can be transmitted over a network and run on any type of computer. Mac, PC, Unix - it doesn't matter. One Java ``applet'' fits all.

Java might have remained a curiosity except that Netscape built the ability to run Java programs into its popular Navigator browser. As a result, there are now millions of Java-ready computers - a plump and juicy market for software developers.

Still, for the past year or so, Java applets on the Internet have been clever little gimmicks that aren't worth the electrons it took to transmit them. For a while, we were overwhelmed with animated Java images dancing across our screens. It was very impressive - for about 20 minutes.

But now we're finally starting to see Java programs that actually do something. You can find dozens of them at Gamelan (http://www.

gamelan.com), a Sun Microsystems Web site that promotes the latest and liveliest Java work.

You'll still find a fair number of geeky time-wasters here, but there are also some stylish and valuable programs. For instance, attorneys and investment brokers should love the EDGAR database applet created by a programmer at New York University. EDGAR is a federal computer system that stores financial data on publicly traded companies. This handy applet makes it quick and easy to look up information stored in the EDGAR database. I was also impressed with an interactive course on understanding financial statements that throws pop quizzes at you every now and then.

There's lots more Java software like this, but don't expect to find full-featured database management programs or word processors. Not that these can't be written - the folks at Sun say Java can be used to write practically any kind of program. So what's stopping them?

Blame Alexander Graham Bell, who didn't have software in mind when he invented the telephone. I tried running that lovely EDGAR applet on my home machine, a 75-megahertz Pentium with a 14.4 modem. It took maybe three minutes to pull it down. Here at the office, on a 120-megahertz Pentium machine with a fractional T-1 link to the Internet, it took about 10 seconds.

No surprise that people keep on buying traditional software for home use rather than using network-based Java software. And that means there's no consumer market for sophisticated Java programs, which is why they're so hard to find. For network computers relying on Java to really catch on, we'll need very fast computer networks, like the 10-million-bit-per-second systems that the nation's cable TV companies are promising to build. But most of the nation's cable infrastructure will have to be rebuilt before such service becomes widely available, and that job won't be finished before the end of the century.

But network computing makes sense inside an organization. Indeed, it's just a return to tradition. Before companies began putting PCs or Macs on their workers' desks, they relied on dumb terminals hooked up to a big mainframe or minicomputer that did the real computing. Most of my colleagues still write on such a system, designed in the 1970s. Look up ``dumb terminal'' in the dictionary, and you'll probably see a picture of a Boston Globe keyboard. But slow and creaky as they are, they get the job done.

A Java-based network would work the same way, only better. Instead of having a mainframe do all the computing, you could make each terminal just smart enough to run Java programs. Then a reporter who needed to write a story would just download a word-processor applet from a server computer, and go to work. And the terminals would be linked to the server over a local area network instead of a modem, so loading up a Java applet would take seconds, not minutes.

Think of the millions of PCs sitting on desks all over the world, each costing about $2,000 but often used as little more than typewriters. Now imagine replacing them with $500 boxes, wired up to a server full of Java programs. And suddenly, the network computing idea doesn't seem ridiculous at all.

This story ran on page 54 of the Boston Globe on 07/11/96.

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