This decision can crucially affect the cost of clients and servers, the robustness and security of the application as a whole, and the flexibility of the design for later modification or porting.
This would require a rich client and might be characterised by a long delay to start and stop (while a whole complex drawing was transferred), but quick to edit.
The original driving force for thin client computing was often cost; at a time when CRT terminals and PCs were relatively expensive, the thin-client–server architecture enabled the ability to deploy the desktop computing experience to many users.
As PC prices decreased, combined with a drop in software licensing costs, rich client–server architectures became more attractive.
[citation needed] In more recent years, the Internet has tended to drive the thin client model despite the prodigious processing power that a modern PC has available.