Adobe Photoshop Goes … Mainframe?

There’s a word you don’t here much anymore. Mainframe. It dates back to the time when all computing was done on a centralized machine and you fed information into it via either punch cards or “dumb terminals.”

The 1980s saw the explosion of the desktop computer and, since then, every 18 months computing power has doubled for the same cost. (A variation on Moore’s Law.) Heck, your cell phone probably has more memory and computing power than my first computer (which was, for the record, a Commodore 128 with the 300 baud modem, 80 character monitor and an external 5.25 inch disk drive).

Now, we do all of our processing on our own machines – everything from word processing and spread sheets to video and photo editing. Will we continue to?

That’s a big question. Google Docs has moved two of those activities online. (Haven’t played with it? If you’re in any sort of organization that does collaborative works, it’s a great tool. And free.) We now store photos online, too.

And, now, Adobe has introduced Photoshop Express – an online version of Photoshop. You upload your photos to their server, send a series of editing commands and it pushes the edited image back to your screen.

Which is kind of like, oh, I don’t know … a mainframe computer?