Ditch the desktop and return to terminal computing

Cable TV has been the poor relation in the UK Television market for decades but with the ability to stream on demand content in brilliant standard terrestrial and satellite TV resolutions I began wondering where this personalised television feed could be leading us.

If the current Virgin Media platform can deliver an individual stream of video to each box on its network then there are fairly immediate consequences for traditional TV channels and our video & DVD collections.  I can rent a film from the comfort of my chair for half the price of the video shop and I needn't worry about having to get it back in time or if the disc will be scratched etc.  So when will this brilliant service be extended to cover entire computer systems?

How wonderful would it be to chuck out the desktop computer and replace it with a small cable box with a few USB ports, a keyboard, mouse and television screen.  The screen would receive a full resolution stream from the cable company's computers and the input devices would send commands back via the cable as is possible now using a remote control.  The cable company would then take care of everything else for you.  There needn't be any difference in the look and feel nor operation of the computer since the cable stream would just be what you see on computer screens today.  Simply switch on the box and a desktop would appear instantly with programs and files accessible as they are on your desktop. There would, however, be no need for a powerful computer chip, graphics card and hefty hard drive in the cable box since the cable company would have all that hardware off site in something like today's Internet data centres.  So you simply have the inputs & outputs in your home and the processing and storage taken care of somewhere else.  Use the cable box's USB ports to attach your camera and USB drive.

This system would offer many advantages including:

• No more waiting for the computer to boot up - just switch on the screen & cable box and its instantly ready to log in since the cable operators computers are always on
• You would pay monthly or as you go rather than paying one large sum to buy your PC.  The Internet would also be included in this price
• Less time wasted trying to sort out technical problems since most hardware is maintained by the cable operator so little or no technical knowledge required
• The processing power and storage is shared.  This means that all of today's wasted storage and processing power inside the worlds desktops will be shared out and thus less needed in total and this should reduce costs.
• The Internet would be faster due to the location of the cable operators computers on major fibre optic Internet links
• Instant updates of programs and operating system - since you subscribe rather than buy you are always using the most recent version of programs.

There are, of course, several disadvantages of this system, mainly the fact that you rely on your cable connection working to do anything - even access your files.  I don't trust Virgin Media with that at the moment!  There are also the obvious security risks that would result in everyone's data being transmitted over the cable network and stored centrally.

I personally believe that aspects of this future is inescapable due to the ever improving bandwidths of the cable system.  It could end up with laptop devices receiving streams via radio waves.  It could be the return of Terminal Computing.