brave [little] meme

Full Circle: The Mainframe Returns

During a conversation with one of the elite few people whom I consider both close friends and experts in the business of information technology, it occurred to me that the current trend towards cloud computing is, somewhat ironically, a throwback to a computing model so old it pre dates the all-powerful Internet. I’m referring, of course, to The Mainframe.

You know the story. Once upon a time, when computers with the equivalent power of today’s wristwatches took up entire refrigerated rooms, hardware and processing power were at a premium. Early corporate networks therefore relied on the idea of many “dumb” terminals (little more than displays with keyboards) acting as the interface between multiple users and the central computing mass, the mainframe. Fixed storage, memory and processing time were all doled out to each user on a time-sharing basis.

Then the personal computing revolution gained momentum, a time of great strides and much rejoicing for all involved. The arrival of the World Wide Web finally made smut and funny cat pictures accessible to the masses, spurring major advances in the availability and effectiveness of high-speed communications in the process.

Fast-forward to 2008. The average PC has more processing power than reasonably necessary, and whereas once the great bulk of processing resources tended to be dedicated to tasks such as science and medicine, today’s computing cycles get thrown into making Lara Croft’s breasts jiggle that  little bit more realistically on millions of household consoles and PC’s.

Enter Cloud Computing, stage left. As the Web’s arsenal of porn-delivery technologies evolves, the ability to achieve an almost desktop-like user experience on web applications is now within reach. Megacorps like Google, (and, eventually, Microsoft and Apple) cotton onto the fact that enticing users and their data to their own centralised services might be a good idea to safeguard their future revenues.

Add in a shaky economy, and the sudden mass realization that not everyone needs a supercomputer in order to access FaceBook, and a new market segment of low-powered computing devices is born. The great Circle of Computing is almost complete.

Of course Google’s many cloud-computing services may be early signs that the mainframe model (albeit in a remote and less centralised sense) is on its way back, but it’s the advent of services like OnLive that really blow my mind. Have we really reached a stage where we can deliver massive amounts of computing power to relatively dumb devices, remotely, and in real time? If so, what chances does the humble desktop PC have against an infinitely scalable server farm?

Maybe going full circle is not that bad an idea. The severe reduction in constant hardware upgrades (have you seen what high-end video cards go for these days?) would be an immediate benefit of such a model, but there are other less-tangible potential benefits. Once the obsession with bigger-faster-more is removed from the PC purchasing equation, all that’s left is user experience, service accessibility, and style.

The moment both your sleek 52” flat-screen and your cheap netbook offer instant, cloud-based access to all the capabilities of today’s elite gaming PC’s, the realization of true ubiquitous computing gets one step closer to reality. Meanwhile, the question of operating system becomes moot, supplanted by the question “which services are best for me?”

Finally (and perhaps counter-intuitively) by giving up their information to the cloud, users will finally be able to use that information in the most effective way: however, wherever, and whenever they want.

Privacy concerns be damned. Sign me up, and jack me in.