You kidding, right? The 80's were the 80's, computers evolved, but the pc as we know it today, hardly is going to change. Even Bill Gates said that once. Those NASA stuff, as you described are only in the movies thank God, and I don't know about the others, but i hate cloud, and unless a company makes use of it, it's 101% useless.

If portability is the concern, :

I prefer to have a "centralized" pc. Nothing beats an all-in-one-pc or a power laptop.

Blu-Ray drives are getting common in notebooks, and these drives are slim, and may get slimmer.

2.5" HDDs are becoming larger in capacity. Integrating a 2TB HDD space inside a notebook is not impossible today.

Crossfire and SLI solutions are possible in a laptop today. And all within a reasonably sized encasing.

SD and other memory cards are more inconspicuous than the USB drives sticking out of the port.

Touchpad is easier on-the-go than an additional mouse, and when not mouse-gaming.

In the end, I prefer just to take out my laptop from my bag, open the lid and start using it.

(Rather than using a "basic box" and sticking multiple stuffs into it's... errr..ports and/or pair multiple bluetooth or whatever devices with it, to start using them.)

There are definitely quite a few companies trying to open up new service-oriented markets. That Onlive game service that lets you play games run on a remote server, cloud storage, online remote applications, etc. It's capitalism baby. It certainly makes sense for them to try 🤣 but I don't really think any of it is particularly appealing to me....

Higher integration in PCs has made things cheaper and I think that has been the primary motivation for it. All of these companies want to undercut each other on price. But higher integration has made things work better too I think. I don't really mind the simplicity of being able to buy a $45 microATX mobo that can do absolutely everything with onboard hardware except play the latest games. This is insanely cheaper, less prone to trouble and obviously way more functional than the old days.

carangil wrote:

I'm thinking in a few years, you won't have 'computers' as you know it. You'll just have a hard drive, 'motherbox', dvd player, wireless keyboard and tv scattered throughout your living room, all talking to each other wirelessly. Whatever compatible devices you walk into the room with automatically get detected and become part of the living room cloud computer. Just walk in the room with a new hard drive or 'graphics processing box' and your upgrade is complete!

I can believe an ultra-high-speed USB port with a plug-in 3D accelerator, but devices scattered about wirelessly? Wifi and whatnot has been around for years now and it still causes people all kinds of trouble. I don't see it happening - not with the kind of convenience that would be needed for mass adoption, anyway.

Whatever compatible devices you walk into the room with automatically get detected and become part of the living room cloud computer.

I can only think what a logistical nightmare it'd be if you had more than one computer. Jesus... imagine trying to have a LAN party.

The simple fact is that the closer some component is to the CPU, the easier it is to send signals from it to the CPU or back. Same for RAM. Same for a video card. Internal components will always be around for the simple fact that there will never, at any moment in time, be a wireless or wired connection that can go faster than a direct circuit to circuit connection.

External components are good because it's easy to switch them betweern things, but internal components will always have the highest performance in terms of speed.

Granted, I don't really know how this is going to affect computing in the future. :P

Whatever technology we will be using, wireless technology will play a key role that's for sure.

Mobile devices will also play a key role. I see Mobiles are getting more and more powerful with each generation and soon they will be fast enough where you just drop them into a dock which is hooked up to a LCD monitor and keyboard and mouse and your other devices and avoiding having to have a PC on your desk.

Storage will definitely move more and more into cloud space. I was just playing with the latest version of Microsoft messenger and it has a new tool called "Live Mesh" which syncs folders (e.g. I chose my documents and my pictures and also favorites) between my desktop and netbook and also the cloud (Sky Drive).

So my money is on these 3 technologies playing a big role:

- wireless
- Mobile devices
- Cloud storage

Regarding decentralization, yes I totally agree that this is hapening. It's been happening for a long time. We used to have 1 PC now we have several PCs, mobiles, PDAs and other devices

I'm a gamer. If it doesn't do it faster/better than before I'm not interested.