can also represent a single point of failure risk. If a server fails, end users lose access to all of the resources supported by that server. This risk can be mitigated by building redundancies, fail-over processes, backups, and load balancing utilities into the system. Redundancy provides reliable host availability but it can add cost to smaller user populations that lack scale. Providers Popular providers of thin clients include Chip PC Technologies, Dell (acquired Wyse Technology in 2012), HP, ClearCube, IGEL Technology, LG, NComputing, Stratodesk, Samsung Electronics, and ZeeTim. History Thin clients have their roots in multi-user systems, traditionally mainframes accessed by some sort of computer terminal. As computer graphics matured, these terminals transitioned from providing a command-line interface to a full graphical user interface, as is common on modern advanced thin clients. The prototypical multi-user environment along these lines, Unix, began to support fully graphical X terminals, i.e., devices running display server software, from about 1984. X terminals remained relatively popular even after the arrival of other thin clients in the mid-late 1990s. Modern Unix derivatives like BSD and Linux continue the tradition of the multi-user, remote display/input session. Typically, X software is not made available on non-X-based thin clients, although no technical reason for this exclusion would prevent it. Windows NT became capable of multi-user operations primarily through the efforts of Citrix Systems, which repackaged Windows NT 3.51 as the multi-user operating system WinFrame in 1995, launched in coordination with Wyse Technology's Winterm thin client. Microsoft licensed this technology back from Citrix and implemented it into Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, under a project codenamed 'Hydra'. Windows NT then became the basis of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Microsoft Windows systems support graphical terminals via the Remote Desktop Services component. The Wyse Winterm was the first Windows-display-focused thin client (AKA Windows Terminal) to access this environment. The term thin client was coined in 1993 by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corporation, while working with company founder Larry Ellison on the launch of Oracle 7. At the time, Oracle wished to differentiate their server-oriented software from Microsoft's desktop-oriented products. Ellison subsequently popularized Negris' buzzword with frequent use in his speeches and interviews about Oracle products. Ellison would go on to be a founding board member of thin client maker Network Computer, Inc (NCI), later renamed Liberate. The term stuck for several reasons. The earlier term 'graphical