Chrome OS Harkens to the Days of the Driveless Desktop

Analysis: The Network Computer (NC), unveiled by Larry Ellison in 1996, may have finally come of age — in the form of Google Chrome.
Eric Knorr, InfoWorld

I'm not the first to say this, but the idea behind Google's forthcoming Chrome OS reminds me of the Network Computer (NC), a driveless desktop unveiled by Larry Ellison in 1996. Back then, here's what I wrote about NC: "Do you really want to do without a floppy, hard, or CD-ROM drive? Be unable to compute -- or even access your data -- when the server goes down? Watch performance slow to a crawl during peak hours? An Internet appliance has everyman appeal at first glance; but on closer inspection, it's two steps back to those bad old mainframe days when Big Brother owned the computer, not you."

[ InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers a razor-sharp analysis of Google's OS in his Fatal Exception blog. ]

Now, 13 years later, Google has raised a similar proposition: an OS that pretty much dictates that you'll be living your computing life on the Internet and storing your data and preferences there, too. So let's break down that hoary old critique of mine and see if it still applies.

First of all, when I knocked the NC for lacking local storage, I was referring mainly to performance. At the time, 28.8bps modems were typical and putting personal storage at the end of such a slender connection seemed like a really bad idea. Now, some Chrome OS computers will have solid-state drives or hard disks, and some may only have a cache (who knows?), but it doesn't matter much. You'll be computing in the cloud. Broadband plus a fast JavaScript engine equals good enough performance, so score one for Google.
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