I transcribe here, literally, the kick-off post of Webtop mania, to remind our (few but dearest) readers what this blog is all about, what's his purpose and why it exists in the first place.
What is the webtop mania? (October 18th 2006)
Consider the following sequence of words:
desktop
laptop
palmtop
...
What is the next element of the sequence?
This little riddle stumbled upon my subconscient about three years ago as I was striving to finish my course by making good use of available services and technologies throughout the web. I had just recently acquired a laptop (wifi ready!) and I was enjoying the euphoria of lap-mobility, using it in airplanes, in trains, at work and at home (I was using a lot the train back then). I was using ftp and remote shells to develop and save some of my work, although in a rudimentar fashion compared to the high end OS graphical environment at the time (I had windows XP). However my little knowledge and experience gave me but a frustrating experience. Once from a cybercafé I couldn't update an important word document from my usb pen because of versioning compatibility, it made a mess between file formats conversion. I even had a hard time to use my university ssh-based mail. This was because I would use a highly customized system. My reach in mobility was simply stuck in my laptop. And I thought: "hmmm... There's got to be a smart way to stuck out from a physical platform, I should be able to edit my word documents from a cybercafe,I don't expect to run Matlab or Mathematica from there, but at least an office document I should!"
Then, along the following last years, I had the opportunity and time to familiarize myself with ides, tag-semantics such as html, kml, xml and xsl, documents repository systems, databases, servers of http, jsp, mail and ftp, scripting languages such as cgi, php and perl, other OSes such as linux and macOS. This and an awe around Google Earth and Google search engine made me think of all the possibilities of formidable tools that the web could produce. Once I realized that the web-based email, though slower, standed more mobile-proof than outlook, or ssh based emails, I simply extrapolated the web-based relevance of applications in the present and near-future world. The limiting bandwidth had just been cut short and the high speed internet was now universally available in my world ... Thus I previewed the webtop!
I did this transcription because, more than six(!) years later, finally my vision starts to materialize. The subtle changing shift in the winds of time that I could felt way back in 2003, today, has finally materialized and other big players, like Google, have hasted their sails for it. They thus released the Chrome OS.
I leave you with the already well-known demo video and some links to what are other techies' thoughts over it. For me, it's needless to say, Google gets the webtop mania. Better than I. And for that, I'm thankfull.
