Dumb terminals with the black background and green text connected to a refrigerator size server (or room size) in the basement of a company dominated in the early days of computing and are still in effect today. The last few companies I have worked for, as a Software Developer, all have some form of this technology still embedded in their business. These systems still provide the backbone for a lot of large companies.

Currently, personal computers have more processing power and storage capacity than some of these refrigerator sized computers. Today’s laptops are a fraction of the cost of these super sized computers and a fraction of the size. I have heard many times that you have more power in your pocket (phone) than these computers, of the past, provided.

Flash forward to today. We have laptops, phones, tablets, a select few of us have Google Glass (not me), and numerous other devices that provide many more times the power of computers of the past, so why are we acting like we did in the past? We are increasingly moving to the old model of dumb terminals connected to super sized computer. This new super sized computer is called the Cloud. I’m not sure I want to distinguish the difference (if there is any) between the Cloud and the Internet in this article, so suffice it to say they are one in the same.

Why are we doing this? Due to todays broadband connections and computing capacity in the cloud we can achieve speed as if all that information was just sitting on your computer’s hard drive. This is why people use services similar to hostiserver.com. In some cases, this is even true. If you use applications like iCloud, Google Calendar, Box.net, or Dropbox then you experience both cloud and local computing intermingled. These applications synchronize the data to ensure whatever device you’re on that your information is available. Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, and Google Drive are all applications that you use in the Cloud and are not running on your local computer. With that being said, applications like Google Drive are considered to be similar to the services that people like Digital Pigeon offer, (see here for more information), and has become a standard in the industry due to the ease of access and transfer of files, whilst also being a secure method of storing data.

More and more applications are increasing on the Cloud. Email, office documents, image processing, video editing, and just about anything you can do on your computer you could find an application in the cloud to do the same thing. After all, no one wants to keep information on paper nowadays, especially because it takes up space and is hard to store. With companies around like FilecenterDMS.com, it’s so easy to turn necessary pieces of information, like office documents, into files that can be stored digitally (not necessarily on the Cloud). Even TV watching is moving to the Cloud. Netflix a few years ago moved a lot of their application to the Amazon Cloud.

How is all this possible? “Web Scale” is a new term being used that helps describe the new approach to computing. It is now, through a number of technologies such as Edge Computing (what is edge computing), possible to share computing power across physical servers. This now gives people and companies the ability to pay for computing power on the Cloud or to create their own (internal) Cloud. New low cost laptops are on the market today that have just enough computing power to leverage these application in the Cloud. This looks very much like the dumb terminal of the past.

What’s old is new again with a twist. We are acting like we did with dumb terminals, but we are able to tap into much more information, as well as share information across the world. This is much different than the dumb terminal to one mainframe, but it follows a similar approach. There are many pros and cons to this new world that we will explore in future articles.