> What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, fro

> What is notable is that the current environment appears to be the logical endpoint of all of these changes: from batch-processing to continuous computing, from a terminal in a different room to a phone in your pocket, from a tape drive to data centers all over the globe. In this view the personal computer/on-premises server era was simply a stepping stone between two ends of a clearly defined range. Sure, that's what happened. But what jumps out for me is that, at both ends of that range, users are relying on remote stuff for processing and data storage. Whether it's mainframe terminals or smartphones, you're still using basically a dumb terminal. In the middle, there were personal computers. As in under our control. That's often not the case now. People's accounts get nuked, and they lose years of work. And there's typically no recourse. As I see it, the next step is P2P.