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Chris' Rant- by Chris Wenham
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A Mainframe On Your Lap

Two events happened to me recently that would first mess up my work and schedule rather badly (thus messing up OS/2 e-Zine! 's schedule too) and secondly give me something to think and write about. The first is that I lost my personal computer (don't ask how, it's a long story that I'll explain some other week), and the second is that I borrowed a laptop from a friend here at OS/2 e-Zine! to replace it until I get my old one back. In the course of that chaotic week, two questions entered my mind: why did I keep all of my work on one, vulnerable machine? And why do I now have more computing power sitting on my lap than existed in the whole world on the day my father graduated from school?

All the Eggs, One Basket

Most of us at home or in small businesses know that our PCs represent a huge investment. If they were lost through fire or burglary, we may have a hard or even impossible time replacing it. A backup may be useless if the backup itself was also lost. This was my case; I didn't think of storing the backup disks elsewhere (and even if I did, none of the computer I was able to borrow have a Zip drive). A similar story happened to another company I once worked for -- a fire burned down their store and destroyed the tape backups they kept in the basement. The result was a total wipeout of everything they had ever done.

So you buy another computer if you can afford it, or if you can't afford it you file an insurance claim. If your computer wasn't insured, you try to borrow one. If you're lucky you might get another computer the next day. But more likely you'll be stuck without one for perhaps a week. For an e-zine that publishes every two weeks, that kind of delay can still be (and was) disaster -- with or without a full set of backups.

WOPR in your Briefcase

In the days that followed the loss I had to do a lot of last minute scrambling to get things in order. A computer was borrowed for the family business, and contributing editor, Dirk Terrell sent me one of his laptops with which to continue my work for OS/2 e-Zine!.

And so here I sit, with a sleek machine, the warmth of its hard drive making it uncomfortable to type on and the unfamiliar touchpad responding weakly to my mouse-accustomed fingers. Twenty years ago the same power that now rests on my knees was time-shared and used to serve hundreds of people, instead of just this one person -- me -- writing an editorial and checking e-mail. Yet were they less productive then than I am now when accomplishing the same tasks? No, they weren't.

In 20 years of Moore's Law (the stipulation that available computing power per dollar will double every 18 months), we've not had time to pause and take a breath. Everything has got smaller and faster and cheaper. But ever since the change from mainframes to PCs 20 years ago, the way in which we use the hardware and software of computers has not really altered much. We all still have mainframes on our laps and under our desks and we're still stupidly making them the supporting pillars of our lives' work.

Backups and the Power Grid Scheme

In the world of electricity generation, where the product is (generally) manufactured the very second that it's consumed, there exists a unique method for storing energy; you simply sell it back to the utility company. Should you own a generator such as a solar panel or wind turbine for your house, you can feed your surplus Kilowatt hours back into the national grid and literally run the meter in reverse. Later, during calm weather or winter months when you're generating less, you pull electricity back off the grid as you normally would. The surplus you sold in the summer was instantly consumed of course, but the other power generators owned by the utility company are always running anyway and the meter keeps track of whatever your net consumption is. The result is like having a magic battery that never looses its charge and never gets full.

With computers we have something similar. Instead of the national grid there is the Internet, and instead of storing kilowatt hours in this grid we can store data and maybe also CPU time.

The concept is simple and is already being experimented with by some companies. Instead of keeping your backups on physical media at your location, which can be stolen, burned or seized, you upload it encrypted and compressed onto the 'net. An Internet backup service merely charges you a few dollars per month for space. The firm, one of many, tags and backs up its customers' data a second time with other, larger data warehouses.

Your computer's operating system may even be configured to use such a remote, encrypted backup as the default location for storing your work files -- so they never even touch your hard drive at all.

This approach steers us close to a Network Computing model, like that of Workspace on Demand. If all your data files are stored on the network, it won't matter what computer you use. That means it could be your own, or a borrowed one, or a replacement after a fire.

Yet it allows us to migrate towards the NC model at our own pace and perhaps decide to settle somewhere halfway on the journey; where our PCs are both independently powerful machines, but rely on the network for the rest of their strength. For as we get used to making the network our backup medium of choice, we may discover technologies that make it our CPU upgrade of choice too. A utility company selling processor time on its fast machines? Maybe. Buying a fast machine yourself and selling "Megahertz hours" of power back into the 'net? Maybe.

And this partial compromise will make computers even cheaper, if the hard drives don't need to be as big, nor the CPUs as fast. Then when a disaster does come it won't hurt so much to buy a replacement.

Computers as a True Commodity

Commodity status is what we should be seeking, to the point where one computer has little to differentiate it from another -- much like a telephone. The configuration and "personality" should be stored on the network and downloaded to the computer you're using as you log in.

From an engineering standpoint OS/2 and Unix are two of the best suited operating systems for this task. And despite what readers pointed out in my last column's talk-back forum about its bloatware trend, OS/2 can still be stripped down easily -- unlike Windows 98 with its Hide-IE-in-the-system-DLLs method of suicide.

So I apologize if this issue of OS/2 e-Zine! doesn't seem to be up to scratch. The senior editor was learning some hard lessons about his, and the industry's own stupidity. If you have anything else to teach me, let me know, in our Hypernews forum.

* * *

Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.


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