Thin clients are computer programs that rely heavily on a server to fulfill computational roles rather than performing these roles independently like traditional fat clients. Thin clients have their roots in terminals used to access mainframe computers and evolved into graphical user interfaces powered by X server software running on the client. Thin client infrastructures allow computations to be shared across multiple clients connected to a single server, amortizing computing power for improved efficiency.

2. A thin client is a computer program which
depends heavily on some other computer to
fulfill its traditional computational roles. This
stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a
computer designed to take on these roles by
itself. The exact roles assumed by the server
may vary, from providing data persistence (for
example, for diskles nodes) to
actual information processing on the client's
behalf.

3. 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.

4.  Thin clients occur as components of a broader
computer infrastructure, where many clients share
their computations with the same server.
 As such, thin client infrastructures can be viewed as
the amortization of some computing service across
several user-interfaces.
 This is desirable in contexts where individual fat
clients have much more functionality or power than
the infrastructure either requires or uses.
 This can be contrasted, for example, with grid
computing.

5. •The notion of a thin client extends directly to
any client–server architecture: in which
case, a thin client application is simply one
which relies on its server to process most or
all of its business logic. This idiom is
relatively common for computer security
reasons: a client obviously cannot be trusted
with the logic that determines how
trustworthy they are; an adversary would
simply skip the logic and say "I'm as
trustworthy as possible!"

6. Traditionally, a thin
client ran a full
operating system
for the purposes of
connecting to other
computers. A
newer trend is
sometimes called
an ultra-thin client
or a zero
client, which no
longer runs a full