Freeing oneself from a dedicated computer

In My Humble Opinion
1

I think “Cloud computing” is the term - right now that mostly means web-based applications that let you access your information from anywhere.

Not long ago, e-mail was downloaded to and stored on a user’s PC. You had to be at your own computer to access your stored e-mail. Gmail freed us from that; now I can access all my e-mail from any networked PC.

Recently I noticed that Google Toolbar stores bookmarks online. This means I can bookmark a page on my work computer, and it’d be accessible from my home computer. That’s one fewer thing to tie me down to one particular computer.

So have you found any others that are practical and useful?

2
3

Just a nitpick, but Gmail didn’t invent web-based email. I’ve had a Yahoo account for ten years, mostly for the reason that it is portable.

4

For that matter, almost all ISPs offer a web interface that allows POP email users to access their email from a browser.

5

I didn’t mean they were the first web-based e-mail. But I believe they were the first to offer enough online storage that we can actually keep all our e-mail archived on the server, rather than just using it to access new messages. At least for me, that was the breakthrough that made PC-based e-mail clients obsolete.