But the iMac has replaced the disk drive with an internet connection, as though it wants to tell us that even if we want to we can't lock ourselves in, that we always have to be in contact, connected. We can't stay home again . It's still easier today to save a file on disk and load it into the disk drive of another computer if we want to work on that same file somewhere else. But if the iMac metaphor is a sign of the future, it won't be long before we save our files to our web sites, and then download them from those sites for future use or reference. It won't matter if we're at home, or work, or school, or at a friend's computer.
Home is where the home page can be accessed.
As the very concept of personal computing evolves into community computing we'll store our information differently. Why print out a copy of an article, or even copy it digitally to my own hard disk, when I can simply link to it. Today we're still unable to embed selected parts of a text into our own web documents, but the day that we'll be able to doesn't seem very far off. The graphic to the right of this text, for instance, is only passing through. It's not downloaded from the Tel Aviv University server that the rest of this text comes from, but rather is called up from a totally different server.