Hey You, Get on to my Cloud

My Dad was an engineer for Hewlett Packard. When I was a kid, I grew up in a world where computers took up an entire room, and when my dad had to work on the weekends, he would bring us with him. To entertain me, he would allow me to use mainframes to play games. Back then, games weren’t nearly as polished as now. I played games like the text based Star Trek or Lunar Lander. I remember that there was a text based drag racing simulator. Later, after cartridge-based video games like the Atari came out, my Dad and his coworkers showed me how to use a machine that would burn ROM chips with software called “Bruno,” that would read a cartridge then create a ROM that was an exact copy while a message on the computer monitor would say: “Bruno is crunching data. Nom. Nom. Nom.” I owned hundreds of Atari and Intellivision games as a result.

I am willing to bet that I played games on millions of dollars of mainframes. The point to this story, was my dad once predicted that computers were too expensive and large for the average American to have in their homes, but he said that one day, it would be common for Americans to have a terminal at their home, and they could rent computer time. He didn’t foresee the revolution that would make computers as powerful as those mainframes fit in the palm of your hand. However, it turns out that he was quite astute when it came to the business side of things.

Jeff Bezos has declared that people will soon have nothing but terminals in their homes, which they will use to rent cloud computing time as a subscription model. Cloud computer is, of course, a term meaning someone else’s computer. Namely, Jeff Bezos’ computer. It’s because companies are busy buying up every computer chip they can lay their hands on. 64gb of RAM that cost me $230 in October are now costing over $600 now. A 4tb SSD that cost $215 in October costs $430 now.

It seems that these companies buying up all of the production have driven costs through the roof. Those same people are saying that they will let you rent the computers they just built, at a handsome markup, of course.

And they are wrong. When prices climb like they have, the market response is predictable. Other companies will enter the market, causing prices to stabilize. Eventually, prices will come down. The first home computers were expensive.

The IBM PC (1981) started at $1,565 (over $4,000 today) for a basic model, with only a 5.25 inch floppy drive for storage. I remember that my Commodore 64 had one of those drives (external, of course) and that drive cost $350. Why was it called the ’64’? Because it had only 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, which is where it gets its name, plus about 20 KB of ROM for its operating system and BASIC interpreter, and the Commodore 64 was popular because it had more memory than its competitors. 64kb of ram is literally one millionth of the capacity of the computer I am typing this one.

Those 5.25 inch floppy drives? Yeah, they held 512 kb of data, and you could double that if you had a hole puncher. Those of you who know how that works, well, you know. The NAS that I use for storing files in the house? It has 12 TB of storage space, meaning it can store the same amount of information as more than 12 million of those drives, hole puncher or not.

The point is this: the market will respond, and it will be as difficult to force Americans to rent computer time online as it will be to tell Americans that they have to buy shares in a community automobile. The real purpose of this is control. If they control your car, your computer, and what you do with them, they control you.

Then there is nothing that they can’t make you do. The title of this piece, most of you will recognize, is a paraphrase of a Rolling Stones song, meant as a protest of how restrictive the Stones thought American society was in the 1960s. It’s odd to me that the counter culture of the 60s is now wanting to give birth to a society that is far more restrictive than 1960s America ever was.