Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Google, Adobe, Chromebooks, and Creative Cloud take us yet again forward to a day long ago.

Google and Adobe have just announced that we can run Adobe’s Creative Cloud on a Chromebook. Wow. I am not trying to be flippant. This is a big deal. You buy a $200 or $100 Chromebook and run Adobe’s software.

Of course you are not running the software on the Chromebook. It would take hours to load a video and do the simplest, smallest edit to it. All the software is running in the cloud on an Adobe computer. The video or whatever is sitting on a Google disk drive or one that Google and Adobe shares.

Once again we go back to days gone by (wasn’t that the title of a Walking Dead episode? But I digress.). In decades past I would sit in front of a relatively inexpensive computer and run software on a relatively expensive computer. The computer in front of me, we called it a “terminal” back then, would merely display things to me and take input from me via the keyboard.

The Chromebook today is the terminal of old. I think people call this “thin client” or something like that now. “Thin client” sounds so much better than “terminal.” Well, I don’t think so. I like the term “terminal,” but, then again, I am old.