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The Next Generation Computer is a Cloud
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It seems like all the TV networks are using some version of the 'Magic Wall'. It was introduced more than a year ago by CNN. Touch screens with lots of sizzle are the new thing. From news anchor to weather, they use it. Light pens and touch screens have been around a long time. Mice, track balls and touch pads were introduced years ago to avoid the fatigue of touching the screen all the time. It's ok to do it for a while, but if you use a computer all the time, it gets tiresome. In order to do work, we need a keyboard. Apple's new offering I-Pad does not have one, although they will bring one out soon. I-Pad + Keyboard equals a Laptop with some things missing, however. People can write emails on tiny keyboard or use an on screen version of one, but a good keyboard makes things a lot easier. We like our keyboards. The first thing to test when you're buying a new computer is the keyboard. If you have an old one you are fond of, you can use it with a USB port. So make sure what you're buying has good USB support. All this is old hat, so what possibly will we wish for on our next generation computer? It appears that power and applications are still king. The laptop has made us very mobile. I don't think we need to get too much smaller, if we lose interface capability in the process. So what beside power do we need? Moving applications onto the Internet should be the next generation. It's a pain to be constantly out of date with packaged software. When we get a new machine, we have to load all our old software and sometimes it just does not work. Lots of applications just get old and tired and should be replaced. Moving applications onto the Web is now called Cloud Computing... up in the clouds above the desktop and above what we think of as the web. Suppose we got a new powerful computer with ultra high speed wireless and wired access to the net. It would be equipped with all the latest gadgets. What would we want?
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We'd want to have access to all our applications in their latest versions with a few versions backward compatibility. We don't want to continue to buy and buy over again Microsoft Word and Excel. We want access to the latest version all the time. We also want to have plenty of storage on our machine and a lifetime of storage on the net's growing server farms. We'd like these new cloud machines to use the power of our machine in combination with the server's power. This will require a whole new operating system that spans the desktop and the server. Google and probably Microsoft are busily working on such a system. Oh, and let's not forget using any screen available. If we walk into any room, we should be able to direct our attention to any large screen and use it for viewing. Microsoft's System 7 has some of this. How about super old applications that we still love? We should be able to switch into old mode and use them at will. The Cloud is the way to go. The sooner the better. For sure in five years, we will be on the cloud. As it always has been, it's the operating system that counts. How fast is it, how reliable and what applications run on it? So the next generation will be operating system dependent. It will be here in 5 years of less
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