T. Gilling
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

One of the things to remember about the capabilities of standalone computers is that they had no choice but to become highly-capable data processors because they were originally islands unto themselves. There was no cloud. They had to do everything for themselves. The PC slowly obtained all the capabilities of the computers that went before it, the mainframes. Now, smart-phones are slowly (quickly?) obtaining all the capabilities of the PC. But the smart-phone is a child of a two worlds, the independent world of the PC and the dependent world of the cloud. In the future it could become more capable and therefore fully independent of the cloud or it could become less capable and more dependent on the cloud. So, I currently see the smart-phone as a confused thing. I believe that the true destiny of the smart-phone is to become a sensor-rich dumb-device that obtains all its functionalities from remotely-located cloud computing-based data centres. This is not possible today because our communications infrastructures are not quite up to the job, but they will be in the future. Now, such a change might seem radical but the sharing of a centralised resource is nothing new, it is exactly how the old mainframe computers worked. The computing capabilities of those mainframes could have been shared more widely but for the fact that the communications infrastructure of the day was not up to it. Today, we are nearing the point where we can easily distribute a centralised computing resource and then the old mainframe-style world will be all that we need. Of course, we will put a modern slant on that bold new world but it will essentially be exactly what we could have had in 1975 if only we had the communications infrastructure to do it.

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T. Gilling

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…is a forward-looking information technologist and the author of The STREAM TONE: The Future of Personal Computing? (www.TheStreamTone.com)