ShareThisCloud computing is upon us and as a person who recently began using Amazon Simple Storage it was with interest that I read a piece in the New York Times about a new product called G.ho.st. The following description taken from the G.ho.st website really gives some insight into the new product and about web computing in general.

Windows, MAC and UNIX are all successors to operating systems that were designed in the 60’s, 70’s and 80's, long before the Internet was even dreamed of. For three decades, it was taken for granted that an operating system runs on one PC and each user's data and apps are walled in by that one physical PC. Each of us had to worry about administering our PC - backup, anti-virus and software upgrades. When we got a new hard disk or PC or a new version of Windows we each had to spend hours migrating our apps, data and settings.

Recently with the advent of the Internet and broadband connections, people have started to move some data and apps onto the Web cloud - Web mail, Web photo albums and more recently Web documents and spreadsheets. Now the data and apps which are on the Web are available from everywhere, but new problems arise. The Web applications lack an operating system and are consequently inconvenient to use - each application has its own URL, its own username & password, its own file system and folders and its own look-and-feel.

G.ho.st was founded in 2006 and launched in 2007 to address this need by providing a hosted web-based operating system that works with third-party web-based software. In many ways G.ho.st is the first true revolution in operating systems since the introduction of graphical user interfaces in the 80's .