Contemporary Status
As of 2007, centralized computing is now coming back into fashion - to a certain extent. Thin clients have been used for many years by businesses to reduce total cost of ownership, while web applications are becoming more popular because they can potentially be used on many types of computing device without any need for software installation. Already, however, there are signs that the pendulum is swinging back again, away from pure centralization, as thin client devices become more like diskless workstations due to increased computing power, and web applications start to do more processing on the client side, with technologies such as AJAX and rich clients.
In addition, mainframes are still being used for some mission-critical applications, such as payroll, or for processing day-to-day account transactions in banks. These mainframes will typically be accessed either using terminal emulators (real terminal devices are not used much any more) or via modern front-ends such as web applications - or (in the case of automated access) protocols such as web services protocols.
Read more about this topic: Centralized Computing
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