Remote desktop

Meanwhile, in the world of Windows, in 1998, Windows NT 4.0 got a new edition of the operating system: Terminal Server Edition. With this edition, Microsoft introduced a new protocol called the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). It enabled the client to view another computer's desktop. With NT4 Terminal Server, the operating system was able to host multiple desktops for multiple users at the same time. From this remote desktop, clients could then launch any application they wanted that existed on the server they were connected to. As with the good old terminals, the client computer did not need to be very capable. In fact, this turned out to give birth to an industry, Think Client computers, capable of connecting to RDP-enabled servers, as shown in the following block diagram: