There weren't any handouts here! I had to write like crazy. I hate it when I have to work at one of these things.

C.J. Paul is an architect for IBM's Workspace On-Demand (WSOD) product, and 10 people came to his sparsely attended demonstration. He set up two notebook computers; one was a Warp Server, and the other one was running WSOD. C.J. showed us the desktop from the client side, and the administration tools from the server side.

I have to say it was all pretty cool, and a heck of a lot easier to administer than, say, MS-Windows. WSOD is basically a stripped down network centric version of OS/2. When a user powers up a WSOD station, it boots up from the network. The user is asked to log on. When the user logs on, the users's desktop appears on the screen, and the system looks like OS/2 after that...

...that is, to a point. The desktop is not modifiable by the user, and the user can't write to the hard drive. WSOD only uses the local hard drive for swap space. WSOD takes a desktop computer and turns it into an NC. I guess this is progress. C.J. characterized WSOD as a bridge between "legacy PCs" and NCs (and 100% pure Java).

Few people care if desktops are fixed. 70% of all desktop users are... users! The other 30% are power users, to whom you can give fat desktop clients. But concentrate on that 70%, and move management of those stations back to the server. "Most users", C.J. asserted, "take no great pleasure in assuring they have the right version of TCP/IP, the right version of WINSOCK.DLL, and the right version of Netscape in order to get to their webpages."

The main idea of network computing is to enable "roaming": to break the connection between the user and the machine. OS/2 never supported this idea, and MS-Windows in all its flavors only partially did so. On your way to Java, IBM reasons, you should use WSOD to support existing applications - DOS, WIN3x and OS/2.

The product has been generally available since last November.