Windows NT has recently been making incredible strides in the server market. NT is trusted to act as web server, ftp server, and even database server. This market has been almost strictly UNIX until now. Is there anything stopping NT from taking over the server market entirely? There is, until NT can offer the remote computing capability of UNIX. NT shows no sign of a native "telnetd". My research will investigate not only the need for this ability, but also the issues involved in implementing it.

To define the need for this service, I will study the role that remote computing has in the UNIX market. We need to understand why this feature was developed in UNIX, and if there is still a need for it. Is Client/Server the only technology we need now? Telnet is something from the days of mainframes, so we could do all our computing on a central, powerful computer. In opposition to client/server, mainframe-style operation has been making a comeback, and distributed computing is another flavour altogether. After a history lesson in why it began, I will research to see if those reasons have changed. I believe that I will find a need for the remote computation. The research community is interested in parallel and fully-distributed computing, while industry has shown an interest in large servers. They will want to utilize this investment as widely as possible. This is where "thin clients" are supposed to show their usefulness. After research, the question becomes implementation.

UNIX has been aided by its mostly non-GUI style when it comes to this question. By using the very simple TELNET protocol, a text-driven program can easily display its output on a remote computer. Even for GUI-heavy UNIX programs, the X windowing system was written to display its output on another system's monitor. Windows NT does not have either of these advantages. Most Windows programs are completely dependent on their graphical user interfaces, and Window's graphical interface was not designed to be exported across systems. This implementation phase will require a strong understanding of the NT Executive, and how to change or replace them to reduce a window to a language to be sent across a network. Learning the executive will be the most challenging part of the research, and replacing some part of it, the most rewarding.