Down The Wire

I was thinking about computer networks the other day - token ring, ethernet etc. and how it seems that technology has gone full circle. With the advent of operating systems like Microsoft Windows, desktop computers took on the mantle of processing and storing data locally thus making a 'mainframe' type infrastructure almost obselete in favour of small workgroups. But in recent years, things seem to have very much reverted back, with desktop machines effectively becoming 'dumb' terminals again.

That led me to consider what, if any, type of data distribution the D'ni would have used. I'm inclined to believe it would have been based on a mainframe architecture and in line with that thinking I have come up with a concept for an terminal-style Age viewer. Along the sames lines as the Nexus, the master 'processor' would constantly monitor a library of linking books, outputting the window into each Age to a terminal such as this for remote viewing: