Google’s announcements of Chromebook and subscription pricing offer a great opportunity to reflect on where we are in the history of computing. It is all too easy to think of this as something radically new, when it is simply the latest entry in a long historical settling down of the locus of computation. I started my ongoing love affair with computing at a fascinating time. In the early 80s businesses were almost entirely dominated by centrally controlled mainframes with dumb terminals while...

Google’s announcements of Chromebook and subscription pricing offer a great opportunity to reflect on where we are in the history of computing. It is all too easy to think of this as something radically new, when it is simply the latest entry in a long historical settling down of the locus of computation. I started my ongoing love affair with computing at a fascinating time. In the early 80s businesses were almost entirely dominated by centrally controlled mainframes with dumb terminals while...