that is pretty much what google is doing with the chromebook. a local terminal with not much state storage, keeping all of the important data in the cloud. th

that is pretty much what google is doing with the chromebook. a local terminal with not much state storage, keeping all of the important data in the cloud. they're trying to do the same thing with android (which is why the google nexus phones keep coming out with such small amounts of flash storage). mobile devices are powerful enough and desktops/laptops are cheap enough now that the computation can be done locally, with the data still being stored on a central server. a decade or two ago, the computation was also done on the servers. microsoft did it with windows terminal server, sun did it with the ray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray), but the concept was basically like vnc'ing into a central server and having your entire session preserved, no matter where you logged in from. and of course, before graphical desktops were big, unix and dumb terminals did the same thing. you could use a vt100 connected to a modem from anywhere, run 'screen -r' and restore your saved session to access all of your applications, data, and email stored on the server.