First post, by carangil
It used to be that a home computer (such as C-64 or TRS-80) lacked any storage and came as a simple 'base unit.' Everything you needed, such as modem, floppy drive, etc was just an external peripheral. When PCs and Macs took over, it became the norm to have all the peripherals built-in to one massive tower. Even laptops became heavy luggable monsters sporting both a cd drive AND a floppy.
I've now noticed that the design of the modern PC is again becoming decentralized. Everyone is buying small laptops, netbooks, and even 'fully loaded' performance laptops are missing optical drives. The modern PC is now a tiny basic unit with everything else on USB: You have your external hard drive for mass storage, an external BD-ROM, and sometimes a USB Tv Tuner. I've even seen USB audio and (non 3d-accelerated) USB VGA output devices. Tomorrow's PC may even have 3d video cards as an external device you just plug into a ultra-high-speed USB port. An upgrade to your RAM will be packaged up like a thumb drive; you just stick it in the side of your computer.
What does everyone else thing of this? I'm typing this on my netbook that I've plugged into my LCD TV, realizing that using a TV as a monitor is a 80's PC meme that's coming back. 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!