jitle you, jitle me, jitle.us

The concept was originally evangelized as the “telecosm” by George Gilder in the pre-bubble days of the 1990s. Gilder thought that the Internet would “hollow out” the PC, meaning that Intel and Microsoft would become less important because their products would become commoditized. If you could spread processing loads across broadband connections, that would obviate the need for a powerful PC in the home. That is, you could do a lot of computing in the centralized Internet server, pass that data over fast Internet pipes, and do very little processing in the client-side computer in the home. Back then, a lot of people felt Gilder was out of touch with reality. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief, tried selling a Network Computer, but it never got of the ground. The idea has now evolved into cloud computing.