When thin clients first appeared on the market over 10 years ago, IBM was a great proponent of this technology even though the first units had slow CPUs, limited memory, and Linux-based operating systems.
In the early days of thin clients, networks were still employing hubs instead of switches. Hubs share all network traffic with all the attached devices; therefore, this type of technology did not work well with the boot-server type of thin clients. In other words, when many thin clients were started at the same time, the network was unable to handle the traffic caused by downloading the OS to every thin client.

Windows CE

As time went on, new operating systems like Windows CE were developed,. Networks started to use switches, eliminating the need to share bandwidth between devices while being capable of full duplex traffic (sending and receiving at the same time). Small in size, Windows CE could fit on the Disk-On-Chip (DOC) mounted inside the thin client as well as provide a place to embed applications.
Windows CE, however, had its own challenges. In addition, the Windows server platforms (NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000 Server) and the early version of Citrix were delivering what people expected from a server platform for hosted applications in colors, compression and encryption. (more…)