What if personal computers were a mistake, actually?

Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by bcmo on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:01PM (#21828054)

I like thought experiments like this. Sort of along these lines, I've been wondering more why we don't make displays that just connect to a cloud hosted VM instead of PC's -- the end user never has to know what or where is powering the images in front of them. Assuming its just network bandwidth issues preventing this, but eventually this could make more sense than having an actual machine in your home. Would be a lot cheaper, there would be hosting economies of scale, etc.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by cattlemansgold on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:26PM (#21828331)

If I'm thinking about this correctly, isn't this essentially what a Chromebook does? Google Sheets, for example, shows me a picture of a spreadsheet that's being generated on a Google server, not my machine. A Chromebook is just a display with a keyboard - and the Chrome browser is just the software that passes the images from the server to my display.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by sliken on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @10:20PM (#21831773)

Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser, windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.

You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.

You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.

Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after all.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by bcmo on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:56PM (#21828690)

Yeah, I think chromebooks are halfway there -- but like chromebooks still have CPU's and an OS. I guess I was thinking that the network connection could be, for instance, to a windows 10 client VM, so you could run games and other things you couldn't do in a chromebook.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by stevewodil on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:04PM (#21828084)

The fact that you would need constant network access in order to view the display would be one thing that potentially hinders the experience.

There are however many desktop as a service providers in existence that effectively host desktops in the cloud and allow users to connect to those desktops from a thin client or their PC.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by bcmo on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @02:51PM (#21828625)

Yeah, I've used like Citrix desktop before at my job, but I'm still using a computer to connect to that. I was thinking just a screen that just has the basic ability to connect to different cloud hosted VM's, and no OS other than that. I'm not sure I've seen anything like that before, either for enterprise or consumer.

I think as years go on the network access issue becomes less and less of a problem though. Plus, for home dekstop computers there is pretty much constant access.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by sliken on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @10:53PM (#21831913)

Sun sold something calls a sunray which was basically a dumb display. Just enough compute to handle the usb devices and send the events over the network and decompress and display the resulting video stream.

Unfortunately sun tied the sunray to incredibly expensive/slow sparc servers. So while the terminals would never need upgrading, the servers where never competitive in the first place.

It's also silly to have expensive server ram filled with frame buffers and the zillion client processes that normal desktops have for weather, date, time, calendar, notifications, speaker volume, notification mirroring, etc.

A more enlightened approach would be something more like plan 9 where compute can transparently happen client side or server side.

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Re:What if personal computers were a mistake, actually? by c22 on Sunday December 22, 2019 @09:18AM (#21857210)

I still have a couple SunRays running in my house attached to a Linux server in the basement. I've upgraded the host 3 times but the terminals have aged in place. They are truly magical devices.

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