Yep, sure. The thin client approach has grown substantially recently, mostly I think due to improvements in networking. But the author was talking about "20 yea

Yep, sure. The thin client approach has grown substantially recently, mostly I think due to improvements in networking. But the author was talking about "20 years time", so the early 80s. What we actually saw was the arrival of the domestic computer. That was the period in which computing became ubiquitous, and actual physical machines doing the processing locally could be found in every business and home. So, I would argue, that for the period he is talking about the fat client and stand alone models were much more dominant than the thin client, in contrast to his expectation. Or to use his reference point, nearly every university had its own computer in the 80s, rather than using a thin client to a host at MIT/Oxford/Harvard etc. And in general, despite the cloud, I think fat clients are still dominant. I.e. look at gaming, the majority of processing is still done locally, despite MMOs and the internet. EDIT: I think most people expected thin computing to dominate. But it turns out to be easier to manufacture and ship PCs around than data.