Tony Westbrook

Last month I spent some time looking at the whole idea of using an old and redundant notebook PC, and reinventing it as a flat screen LCD with the aid of a couple of plug-in USB products.

At a stroke, my original thinking went, I could create a cut-price TV to compete with the best that Dixons could offer, while also using up something that would otherwise only be good for a doorstop.

But this theoretically simple idea was riddled with difficulties and obstructions, and it was hard to come to anything other than one conclusion: that an external USB TV tuner might be a great accessory to plug into your latest notebook PC, but it probably won't save your old model from the scrap heap.

The difficulty of recycling PC gear has been a problem for me for a long time. I think I have an inability to accept that something perfectly serviceable is no good simply because I could buy something better in the shops.

As a result, my attic is full of ancient products that I can't quite bring myself to throw away, even though 1,200 baud modems and disks containing DOS Version 4.0 are of little use today.

However, I notice that Hewlett Packard has resurrected a concept I remember seeing and reviewing in the early '80s and, even longer ago, fixing as an employee of HP. It's new because it's now based on blade servers, and is called by HP "virtualisation".

The idea is that you can tie a thin client device (or PC) to a specific blade in a server, and then the applications and other resources are pooled in the blade server and connected to the user via a client connection.

As HP explains by way of justification: "Consolidated Client Infrastructure is HP's alternative to the traditional, distributed desktop environment.

"By moving PC processing, storage and networking from the desktop to the data centre, adaptive enterprises can simplify the management of the desktop infrastructure, reducing costs and increasing agility at the same time." You can read the full release here.

But wait a moment. Doesn't this sound similar in concept - although the technology has changed a bit - to the idea of a minicomputer serving intelligent terminals, as per HP's 1000 or DEC's PDP 11 minicomputers of the '70s and '80s?

And it sounds even closer to a whole raft of first-generation small business multi-user computers that I can recall seeing and reviewing for various magazines only slightly more recently.

These machines were typically based on the then standard Intel microprocessors (8086) and used various 'PC on a board' architectures to serve each of several terminals and users.

When the first local area networks were just appearing they offered an alternative way to bind several PCs together, and had the benefit of being able to share then-expensive resources such as memory and disk drives.

Admittedly these machines often had proprietary operating systems and application software, so there have been some changes over the years thanks to de facto standardisation.

So maybe my collection of rotting old technology isn't quite so useless after all. Perhaps I can use it as inspiration for the next PC or corporate IT breakthrough.

Anyone fancy an acoustic coupler for their 3G mobile phone, or a copy of MP/M to run their Gameboy in multi-user mode?

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