My sister on the Internet

I still remember the first day I connected to the Internet and I remember how difficult it was.

The first computer I ever had was my fathers' Amstrad. It would run MS-DOS and read Floppy Disks of the size of my hand. I disassembled it and assembled it again several times and I am already wondering if one day I will take out from the garage and it will still be able to run its only application: Lotus.

My father had a Compaq using Win 3.1 which he was not keen on let me use it. The only thing he would let me do for many years was playing Solitaire and make drawings on the Paintbrush, someday he would let me print these drawings on the magnetic printer in black and white. I just hope someone kept one of this master pieces.

I finally convinced my father to buy me a personal computer, it was meant to come in Christmas Day but it did not arrived. Finally, by the end of February we bought it. A brand new Pentium II 300Mhz, what a blast! It even had a Voodoo Banshee VGA board to play The Sims I ou GTA II.

My home did not had a land line phone, so I had to install one on my name as no one at home wanted it, and so I did it.
I bought the famous Diamond Supra 56K and in the late 90's as you can imagine the internet was not very similar to what it is now. This modem was so good that one day I sold it for the same price I bought it but that's another story...

I did not bought my sister but eventually one day she showed up at home, she is smaller than the table kitchen but already owns a Centrino with Windows XP, which she uses to play her +4 rated games, while learning by try-and-error, to match letters with objects and all this amusing stuff made for her age.
I had to start with Alex Kid in the Miraculous World on my Master System which was far less didactic.

She doesn't know, by far, how to write down her name but we wrote her name in a board in capital letters and she copies it to log in her games because they need an user name. It is funny to see her struggling to enter her username by franticly search the keyboard for "F", "I", "L" and so on, till writing her name "Filipa".

Even funnier was that after she log I tried to play her game, eventually showing off her how to do it. Fool of me. I could barely understand how to browse all those vivid color and objects in the screen: red balloons for the balloon game, black door for exiting, etc.
Our progenitor told me later that she had already completed all the assignments available on that game and she was waiting for me to install something new.

It seems new time I will have to install her something more difficult maybe some endless RPG or just give her the admin password for her to install whatever she likes...


This is to say, the world had changed and the big web is one of its reasons. Either you believe it or not.

Imagining how the future is a very creative mental exercise. You imagine things that do not exist and then put all the existing pieces together in order to make it happen.

I believe on internet and the browser. I do not believe on the hardware and its OS.

From my point of view (and not only), Internet will over take all other applications. We are/will edit our documents, store our music, use maps, contacts online. But not only: we will massify the use of heavy applications like ERPs, graphic and video editor programs.

The reason is simple: if we can have the same usability, look-n-feel and performance that a fat client can provide us on the most lightweigthed client that exists, the browser, why the well will I have to bother with installations, memory and hard drive problems and other technical problems.

The future of software applications is being twisted because of the massive internet infrastructure and by now nobody needs to wonder himself why Google was so keen on MS Office Engineers, or do you?

Happy comments,
TM

Update: During one of my reads on the FT I came across the gadget column. Check this Web OS : http://g.ho.st