The Past, Present, and Future

In 1997 Larry was presenting at a conference. The topic was moving PowerBuilder applications to the Web. He was asked about the future of computing. Here was his thought process. First we had dumb terminals such as VT100. Next we had client/server with fat clients. At that time (1997) we were working on thin client applications. The prediction was that the future would be a robust internet client. Now in 2009 where are we?  (R)ich (I)nternet (A)pplications or fat robust internet client.  This is what products such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash are for.