You walk into the room. It’s cool and quiet. You see thirty new
workstations giving great service. Your cost of hardware was
CAD$350 for each workstation, CAD$10 to connect it to an
existing 100Mbps LAN, and about CAD$60 for a share of a server
in another room (CAD$1 = US$0.87). Your software costs were only
some download and CD burn time and forty minutes for
installation. Your operating costs are virtually nil. The server
runs for months without a reboot. The workstations have nothing
but network boot loaders. You back up only one machine, the
server. The workstations use twenty watts each and have no fans.
Magical? Yes. Magic? No. Arthur C. Clarke once made the comment
that “technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from
magic”. A stock server or a custom-built server made from off-
the-shelf parts has taken the place of the mainframe in a
client/server arrangement. Moore's Law makes the hardware cheap.
GNU/Linux makes it free to use to its potential. This is old but
capable technology made easy