After a blu-ray legacy

I just finished watching Tron: Legacy tonight. I pre-ordered a 5-disc collection on amazon and it finally showed up today. It's an interesting movie for those who like computers and programming; perhaps a bit dull otherwise. The visuals are stunning, really top notch (although C.L.U. could use some work, even if he is cutting edge sfx technology). After watching it a second time, it still strikes me as an interesting commentary on the state of computing today. We are headed towards a reversion of sorts: comparatively dumb terminals connecting to the mainframe to accomplish all manner of things. From creating and sharing office documents (mind you, not Microsoft related, just the old-fashioned sense of the word) to posting about how totally wasted you got last night, it's all being shuffled off from local creation and storage to remote, centralized locations. It is strange to see. There is power, and utility, in moving to this kind of computing, but this is how computing began.

Large and expensive mainframe computers were installed by entities fiscally big enough to afford them, and access to their computing power was alotted to people who interacted with the computer from a remote terminal that amounted to little more than a screen and a keyboard. The paradigm this time around is somewhat different, as your terminal will no doubt retain the ability to do some things on its own. Mundane tasks that don't need to be performed by the central "computer" are handled by yours.

The problem will once again become what it was before: access. It will come down to having to go through internet service providers to access all the things we do in our daily digital lives, and that access will cost dearly as things now stand. The companies that perform these types of services for us do not want to be merely the way to get to where you want to be online (Facebook, Google, Zynga, whatever), they want to be a destination as well. That argument is well underway so I won't undertake it here. However, there will also be a problem of bandwidth. If all of us increasingly do everything we need to do to get through our daily lives in ways that involve cloud computing then we will eat up the ability to connect to those services.

It's interesting to note that much of the power of modern computing began with the decentralization of the mainframe. Providing everyone their own computer fostered a tremendous amount of innovation. It seems that innovation is headed back in for it's tail; Ouroboros hungry for more.

I'll leave off with that, but I may revisit this topic later. At least, I hope I do because this strikes me as half-formed at the moment.