4 ms·

You are kinda missing OP's point. It is true that today's phones are several order of magnitudes more powerful that those of 50 years ago, but OP's point is th

You are kinda missing OP's point. It is true that today's phones are several order of magnitudes more powerful that those of 50 years ago, but OP's point is that we are kinda still in the paradigm where a lot of the computing we rely on happens on remote servers. So, while the computing power of the 80s is very well accessible to us, our needs have grown far beyond that and are only serviceable using remote servers. Take Google Search itself for example.

simonh 9y ago
Im not missing any point. >...this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. The argument that we don't need or use local computing power is not valid. The nuance you are imagining isn't there. Of course networked services are incredibly valuable. But most of them would be useless without local client software and there are plenty of things we use mobile devices for now where online services are just a convenient adjunct to powerful local applications. 'For the most part' almost every time I use my phone I unlock it using locally running fingerprint recognition software and interact with a high performance animated graphical user interface, regardless of what else I do with it. You can't wish these things away as irrelevant just because you've got used to them.
- jamespo 9y ago
  Today's GUI is yesterday's terminal
  - KGIII 9y ago
    I am still sort of baffled by this trend. In my pocket, I have a device with capabilities of a supercomputer from not that many years ago. So do many other people. Yet, with all this, we're slowly reverting to the days of the dumb terminal. The concept of data ownership is all but dead. Even trivial things, like word processors, are being moved to the cloud and more things are requiring connectivity.
    - simonh 9y ago
      But then a huge chunk of the smarts in e.g. Google Docs is in the JavaScript you're executing locally. Just because you download the code at runtime doesn't change the fact your device is doing a ton of local computation to make that application work. A lot of web apps like that are actually local JavaScript apps with a relatively dumb web storage backend. Then again I mainly use google docs using the native app on my iPad.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        Yeah, there is still a big difference between JavaScript and an installed application. I agree that they are functionally similar, but they are philosophically different and a paradigm shift from the brief moment where computer users nominally owned their data and had control of their platform. They still can, of course. You can get any number of word processors to install and run locally. However, a smaller percentage are doing so. For better or worse, they are putting their data, the output of their labor, onto computers that don't belong to them. No, they don't have to, but many do so. The numbers for something like Office 365 are amazing. It's great business for the cloud providers, but is it really good for the end user? Then again, does the end user really give a damn? Evidence suggests not. I'm not sure if they are making informed choices, however. With the increased censorship going on, I'm a bit concerned with the trend. Meh... Just some thoughts on the subject. Even if it is a problem, I have no idea how to fix it. I'm not even sure it's a problem.
- notahacker 9y ago
  > The argument that we don't need or use local computing power is not valid. The nuance you are imagining isn't there. Of course networked services are incredibly valuable. But most of them would be useless without local client software and there are plenty of things we use mobile devices for now where online services are just a convenient adjunct to powerful local applications. But the original argument is the reverse of that: they weren't arguing that local computing power was unnecessary, but that it would be insufficient because what people really needed computers for was to connect and do complicated things. The fact you use more processing power than they envisaged being possible on a microcomputer to do something as trivial as unlock your phone is a moot point to the "computer terminals do much more interesting stuff when they're connected to each other" argument that was actually being made. I remember a time when that wasn't true, and could create and play with lots of interesting stuff on a computer with the hard disk space of a thirty second YouTube clip which didn't talk to other computers except reluctantly by floppy disk. Quite possibly you do too, and arguably that makes certain seventies computer magnates look silly. But even now when computers are several orders of magnitude more powerful and offer much better games, somewhat better graphics editing and frankly barely-improved word processing, most people use most computers to interact with other people or services or experiences online, and would have a lot less use for them otherwise.
  - simonh 9y ago
    >But the original argument is the reverse of that: they weren't arguing that local computing power was unnecessary.. It was literally the justification given for killing projects to develop home computers.
emodendroket 9y ago
I feel like this is somewhat cyclical where thick and thin clients are variously in vogue.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  More like the computing world has rebooted itself 1-2 times. First there were institutional computers, the big irons (or dinosaurs as the web kiddies love to call them these days). then came the microcomputer, and it spread computing to people that had barely heard about it. This largely rebooted the thinking about computing. Then came the smartphone, and similarly it brought in a whole mass of people that had minimal interest for the earlier iterations. And thus we seem to have another reboot going. The reboot is as much mental and social as it is technical btw. There is a technical layer to it sure, as there has to be some amount of hardware and software to draw people in. But what really reboots things is when the number of people that come in overwhelm those that are already in, and thus the newcomers have time to form their own mental and social models of how things should be.

simonh 9y ago

Im not missing any point. >...this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. The argument that we don't need or use local computing power is not valid. The nuance you are imagining isn't there. Of course networked services are incredibly valuable. But most of them would be useless without local client software and there are plenty of things we use mobile devices for now where online services are just a convenient adjunct to powerful local applications. 'For the most part' almost every time I use my phone I unlock it using locally running fingerprint recognition software and interact with a high performance animated graphical user interface, regardless of what else I do with it. You can't wish these things away as irrelevant just because you've got used to them.

jamespo 9y ago
Today's GUI is yesterday's terminal
- KGIII 9y ago
  I am still sort of baffled by this trend. In my pocket, I have a device with capabilities of a supercomputer from not that many years ago. So do many other people. Yet, with all this, we're slowly reverting to the days of the dumb terminal. The concept of data ownership is all but dead. Even trivial things, like word processors, are being moved to the cloud and more things are requiring connectivity.
  - simonh 9y ago
    But then a huge chunk of the smarts in e.g. Google Docs is in the JavaScript you're executing locally. Just because you download the code at runtime doesn't change the fact your device is doing a ton of local computation to make that application work. A lot of web apps like that are actually local JavaScript apps with a relatively dumb web storage backend. Then again I mainly use google docs using the native app on my iPad.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Yeah, there is still a big difference between JavaScript and an installed application. I agree that they are functionally similar, but they are philosophically different and a paradigm shift from the brief moment where computer users nominally owned their data and had control of their platform. They still can, of course. You can get any number of word processors to install and run locally. However, a smaller percentage are doing so. For better or worse, they are putting their data, the output of their labor, onto computers that don't belong to them. No, they don't have to, but many do so. The numbers for something like Office 365 are amazing. It's great business for the cloud providers, but is it really good for the end user? Then again, does the end user really give a damn? Evidence suggests not. I'm not sure if they are making informed choices, however. With the increased censorship going on, I'm a bit concerned with the trend. Meh... Just some thoughts on the subject. Even if it is a problem, I have no idea how to fix it. I'm not even sure it's a problem.
notahacker 9y ago
> The argument that we don't need or use local computing power is not valid. The nuance you are imagining isn't there. Of course networked services are incredibly valuable. But most of them would be useless without local client software and there are plenty of things we use mobile devices for now where online services are just a convenient adjunct to powerful local applications. But the original argument is the reverse of that: they weren't arguing that local computing power was unnecessary, but that it would be insufficient because what people really needed computers for was to connect and do complicated things. The fact you use more processing power than they envisaged being possible on a microcomputer to do something as trivial as unlock your phone is a moot point to the "computer terminals do much more interesting stuff when they're connected to each other" argument that was actually being made. I remember a time when that wasn't true, and could create and play with lots of interesting stuff on a computer with the hard disk space of a thirty second YouTube clip which didn't talk to other computers except reluctantly by floppy disk. Quite possibly you do too, and arguably that makes certain seventies computer magnates look silly. But even now when computers are several orders of magnitude more powerful and offer much better games, somewhat better graphics editing and frankly barely-improved word processing, most people use most computers to interact with other people or services or experiences online, and would have a lot less use for them otherwise.
- simonh 9y ago
  >But the original argument is the reverse of that: they weren't arguing that local computing power was unnecessary.. It was literally the justification given for killing projects to develop home computers.

emodendroket 9y ago

I feel like this is somewhat cyclical where thick and thin clients are variously in vogue.

digi_owl 9y ago
More like the computing world has rebooted itself 1-2 times. First there were institutional computers, the big irons (or dinosaurs as the web kiddies love to call them these days). then came the microcomputer, and it spread computing to people that had barely heard about it. This largely rebooted the thinking about computing. Then came the smartphone, and similarly it brought in a whole mass of people that had minimal interest for the earlier iterations. And thus we seem to have another reboot going. The reboot is as much mental and social as it is technical btw. There is a technical layer to it sure, as there has to be some amount of hardware and software to draw people in. But what really reboots things is when the number of people that come in overwhelm those that are already in, and thus the newcomers have time to form their own mental and social models of how things should be.