We are still early with the cloud

We are still early with the cloud
erikbern.com

I have files on my computer from the 1990s and 2000s. If we lived in the cloud-centric world those projects that I did back then would probably be gone forever since I'm not sure I would have kept paying rent on them.

There's also no retrocomputing in the cloud. I can start DOSBox on my laptop and run software from the DOS era. That will never be possible in the cloud. When it's gone it's gone. When a SaaS company upgrades, there is no way to get the old version back. If they go out of business your work might be gone forever, not just because you don't have the data but because the software has ceased to exist in any runnable form.

It all seems like an ugly dystopia to me. I don't think I'm alone here, and I think these things are also factors that keep development and a lot of other things local in spite of the advantages of "infinite scalability" and such.

I'm not saying these things are unsolvable. Maybe a "cloud 2.0" architecture could offer solutions like the ability to pull things down and archive them along with the code required to access them and spin up copies of programs on demand. Maybe things like homomorphic encryption or secure enclaves (the poor man's equivalent) can help with privacy.

... or maybe having a supercomputer on my lap is fine and we don't need this. Instead what we need is better desktop and mobile OSes.

In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality, with its degree of "nativeness" depending on the horsepower of the machine you were using. This is quite different from, say, a chromebook which is more like a remote terminal to a mainframe.

I was shocked when I encountered a Sun workstation: what an enormous step backwards. The damned thing even ran sendmail. Utterly the wrong paradigm, in many ways much worse than mainframe computing. Really we haven't traveled that far since those days. Cloud computing really still it "somebody else's computer."

There's no "OS" (in the philosophical sense) for treating remote resources truly abstractly, much less a hybrid local/remote. Applications have gone backwards to being PC-like silos. I feel like none of the decades of research in these areas is reflected in the commercial clouds, even though the people working there are smart and probably know that work well.

* Don't get me wrong: these environments only ran on what are small, slow machines by today's standards and mostly only ran on the LAN.

Just stop there.

What the author (and I!) want is for my computer on my desk to have a seamless integration with the Cosmic AC in Hyperspace.

The problem is that the transition point costs me money and the amount is generally unknown or unpredictable.

My laptop or desktop have a fixed price and then I get to use them infinitely. Until that becomes true for the cloud, it will always be hamstrung.

(There is a secondary argument that progress in computing has been held up by the fact that UPLOAD speeds basically haven't moved in 20 years--but that's for another day).