History
Thin clients have their roots in multi-user systems, traditionally mainframes accessed by some sort of terminal computer. As computer graphics matured, these terminals transitioned from providing a command-line interface to a full graphical user interface, as is common on modern thin clients. The prototypical multiuser environment along these lines, Unix, began to support fully graphical X terminals, i.e., devices running X server software, from about 1984. X terminals remained relatively popular even after the arrival of other thin clients in the mid-late 1990s. Modern Unix derivatives like BSD and GNU/Linux continue the tradition of the multi-user, remote display/input session. Typically, X server software is not made available on thin clients, although no technical reason for this exclusion would prevent it.
Windows NT became capable of multi-user operations primarily through the efforts of Citrix Systems, which repackaged NT 3.5.1 as the multi-user operating system WinFrame in 1995. Microsoft licensed this technology back from Citrix and implemented it into Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, under a project codenamed "Hydra". Windows NT then became the basis of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. As of 2011 Microsoft Windows systems support graphical terminals via the Remote Desktop Services component.
The term thin client was coined in 1993 by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corp., while working with company founder Larry Ellison on the launch of Oracle 7. At the time, Oracle wished to differentiate their server-oriented software from Microsoft's desktop-oriented products. Ellison subsequently popularized Negris's buzzword with frequent use in his speeches and interviews about Oracle products.
The term stuck for several reasons. The earlier term "graphical terminal" was chosen to contrast such terminals with text-based terminals, and thus puts the emphasis on graphics. The term thin client was also not well-established among IT professionals, most of whom had been working on fat-client systems. It also conveys better the fundamental hardware difference: thin clients can be designed with much more modest hardware, because they perform much more modest operations.
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