In these early months of the year, we are all plagued by a variety of excesses from the holiday season: too much food, too much drink, too little exercise. I suggest that for 1999, you think thin.

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about your avoirdupois. For the next couple of years, newspapers should be looking beyond the client-server model of computing and start looking toward thin-client technology.

Under client-server, you went out and purchased a big desktop computer for each and every one of your workers (in addition to a pretty hunky machine in the computer room). Rather than having a mainframe computer handle all the extensive computing tasks, you moved the computations down to the desktop and only sent completed data back to the server.

But the notion behind thin-client technology is that you don’t need a big, expensive computer on every desk to accomplish theoretically trivial tasks. Here are some reasons you get a cheaper computer:

• Rather than having to buy everyone big, new (and expensive) central-processing units (like Intel’s Pentium II or Apple Computer’s PowerPC G3), you can use older (and cheaper) technologies.

• Memory—usually called RAM—is smaller. Rather than needing hundreds of megabytes of RAM, only dozens of megabytes are needed. Though RAM is cheap now, this may not always be the case. Knowing you need less is a big plus.

• Similarly, you don’t need a disk drive that has gigabytes of storage space. A thin-client computer has a relatively smaller drive (which costs less).

• As they get their software from a central server, both the floppy disk and CD-ROM drives can be eliminated in thin-client computers, further driving down costs.

• Last but certainly not least, a thin-client machine doesn’t need an operating system. Whether you buy your operating system from Microsoft, Apple or Sun, you pay for the OS (upgrades from Windows 95 to Windows 98 or from Mac OS 8 to Mac OS 8.5 both cost around $100 a machine). When you buy a machine pre-loaded with an operating system, that adds to the price.

In the world of software, thin-client applications aren’t the space and resource gluttons that you’ve come to expect with PCs. Rather than requiring a variety of programs (many of which have their own unique interfaces, giving you training challenges), thin-clients use only one or two "gateway" applications—usually browsers.

Although you might consider the latest incarnations of browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator anything but "light," when you take into consideration that one of these programs would be one-half (or all) of your applications suite, they are still much smaller than what you’re used to.

Browser-based technologies are cheaper, too. By writing small applications in a language such as Sun Microsystems’ Java, software developers know they can deploy their solutions across a variety of potential platforms—including a thin client.

If you’re willing to take the leap, moving toward a workgroup product such as Lotus Notes from IBM’s Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., for your editorial or classified applications could also be considered "thin-client."

Whether you are running the application on your client machine or using it in its browser-based incarnation (called Domino), Notes has been deployed successfully at a variety of newsrooms around the world (and there are advertising applications under development).

Notes has been customized for newspapers by at least four different programming teams: NewsEngin of St. Louis; Dalai of Monterey, Mexico; CoDesCo of Oststeinbeck, Germany, and Associated Newspapers of London. Associated’s product will be marketed in the United States by System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento.

And despite the fact that the software has been customized for the newspaper industry, most (if not all) of these suppliers will be offering their solutions at lightweight prices. Now marketed by DeskNet of New York City, NewsEngin comes in around $800 a seat. If you could put NewsEngin software on an inexpensive client workstation (think thin), the price per seat of newsroom technology could drop to less than $2,000.

With the going rate for a client-server-based editorial system running anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 per seat, including hardware and software, shouldn’t you be thinking thin this year?

Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (650) 994-2108. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.