The other day, I drove by the old, abandoned headquarters of Digital Equipment Corporation, that one-time technology giant since swallowed up and dismantled by rivals. I started my career there as a writer, just as the company was on the ascendancy, and later I worked for the ad agency that handled the account. I wrote the first Vax ad, and probably the last one too.
It's been three decades and more since Ken Olsen and Digital revolutionized computers by making access both interactive and distributed. Ironically, he couldn’t see that personal computers were going to take over the desktop, even though, in some ways, they were an extension of his own idea.
But PCs were also very different from Mr. Olsen's vision. PCs distributed more than access. They distributed the computer power itself, the processing and the applications. As a result, over the years, we the users have accumulated an enormous overhead and duplication of local computer power and cost.
That's why the Cloud is on the horizon. Built on the Internet, the Cloud will allow us to decouple our information access from our information technology. Our storage and applications can all float in the Cloud, and we can focus on what we really want to do--communicate and use information.
Mr. Olsen disagreed with PCs on one important point. He didn't think people needed computer power as such, they just needed the access. And on that point, it turns out he may have been right.
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