Mainframe 2.0?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about clouds and all the things that can be done in them.  I was just having a conversation the other day about how pretty soon our computers will be “dumb terminals” and even our OS will be “in the cloud”.  Google is been rumored to be close to releasing its GDrive – A cloud storage drive for your computer.  An article at foxnews.com predicts that “Google’s Rumored GDrive May ‘Kill’ the PC”.  Now I don’t think things will go as far as they say they will but I do think that we will move to what I just dubbed Mainframe 2.0 where instead of “dumb” terminals however, I think we will do part of our processing on the local machine with the more processor intensive or large scale storage happening in the cloud. We will probably still have multi-core pcs with lots of ram, but processing videos or large tasks could be made much faster. Of course this won’t be a viable solution until we have ubiquitous high speed internet. But maybe some day we will log in to our computer from any computer because the OS is in the cloud…

Isn’t it funny how things kinda tend to go full circle?  It reminds me of this quote I found:

Historical footnote: Way back in the mists of time, people not only didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t even have telephones. (It’s true; you can look it up.) To communicate over any sort of distance, people relied on the telegraph. Due to the limitations of the technology and to the costs involved, people also had to resort to using cryptic messages like this: C U 2MAR O. Talk about primitive, huh? Today, of course, you can use your fancy, high-tech digital cell phone to send really cool text messages like this: C U 2MAR O. We’ve come a long way, baby.