The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time, Mar 2009:
"I wrote this story on a netbook, and if you had peeked over my shoulder, you would have seen precisely two icons on my desktop: the Firefox browser and a trash can. Nothing else.
It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser.
...
Come to think of it, because none of my documents reside on the netbook, I'm not sure I even need the trash can."
Smartphones and
tablets
then arrived.
An age of thin clients seemed ahead.
But clients do not need to be thin:
In fact, cheap modern clients are powerful enough to run complex apps
and have reasonable-size storage.
Instead of super-thin clients,
a trend has been to have cloud storage integrated into the client.
They might have local storage of files, for when off-network,
but synchronised with copy on cloud storage.
Same files visible on multiple devices.
Files survive upgrade / loss of devices.
But not by a technophobe.
This was by
Clifford Stoll,
an Internet pioneer in the 1980s.
It shows how hard it was even for 1980s-to-early-1990s Internet people to predict the future.
He says it is hard to find information online (which was true then).
"Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them - one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question".
But do that now
and you immediately get
this,
which is so detailed that it even has
this.
He says e-commerce is tiny (which was true then).
"how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"
Ancient Brain