The CTO of Sun Microsystems, Greg Papadopoulos thinks that the world only really needs five computers. Yes, that's right just five, so forget that PC or laptop sitting on your desk right now, Sun thinks you don't really need it... or at least you won't in the future.
Sun Microsystems, whose flagship product is the Solaris UNIX Operating System has long been an advocate for the shift back to the master server/terminal paradigm of computing, harkening back to the days of dumb terminals interfacing with some gargantuan computer in the basement of an office building, where all the work was done by the server and the terminal merely shuttled input and output data back and forth. In the past few years, the industry has started looking again at the concept of "thin" clients, smaller PCs with a very small hard drive, little RAM and CPU that relies largely on a more powerful server with lots of storage to "push" content (applications, data) to the desktop.
Recently, the Sun CTO Papadopoulos posted to his blog that the future of computing would center on a handful of very big computers that run the desktops of all the world's home computers. CNet News sits down with him to do a little Q&A about what exactly he means and how he thinks the future will pan out