The personal computer as we know it first came on the scene in January 1977, when Commodore released the PET, the first mass-produced, commercially successful PC. It was quickly followed by the Apple II in June of that year, and in November of ’77 by Radio Shack’s TRS-80. Since then it has completely transformed the way we work, shop, learn, and interact with others.

Over that nearly 35 year period, one constant that has remained unchanged is the way that data is stored. Whether on cassette tapes, floppy disks, CDs or hard drives, it has always been tied directly to the local machine. This has remained true even during the first two decades of the Internet age.

This is rapidly changing, however, as mobile devices begin to outpace PCs in popularity and use. It’s estimated that 35% of Americans now own a smart phone, and that is expected to increase to 50% in the near future. Factor in the advent of tablet devices and netbooks, and the demand for access to data from anywhere in the world is spelling the end for the old way of storing files and apps.

Enter the cloud, and a new era of truly mobile computing. Suddenly a broker on a business trip to Bangkok can access a financial report he authored a week before in Manhattan, and a student can turn in a Google Docs link instead of a physical term paper. A surgeon can review X-rays made at a hospital hundreds of miles away, and a working mom can look at pictures of her kids on her iPad, with no need to store the relevant information on the devices used.

If all of this makes the hard drive passé, then a new innovation started by Amazon could soon make local processing power less of an issue than it has historically been, especially for surfing the Internet. A typical web page can require accessing over 80 files, which are delivered from multiple domains. Traditionally it has been the job of the PC processor to do the work of fetching and unpacking all of those remote sites.

With the launch of the Silk browser, however, much of that work is done by Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Leveraging its nearly limitless processing power and always-on Internet connections, the app can deliver content to the user’s screen in times that would have once seemed impossible.

Silk also remembers your personal page viewing habits, preparing content you normally view before you even request it. For example, let’s say you typically check your email first, followed by a quick trip to weather.com and then to cnn.com to digest the daily news. The browser anticipates that you will follow this pattern when you first log on and preloads the sites, so that when you enter the URL or click a bookmark the data is already waiting for you.

Steve Jobs once said that we are entering a post-PC world. He was right; we’re there now. Information that was once locked up in disks and drives sitting on your desk is now held online, accessible from any device with an Internet connection. The new era brings its share of risks as well as opportunities, and these issues will be the subject of debate for years to come. What’s no longer debatable, however, is that the future is here, and it’s shaped like a cloud.

Related posts:

1. Free Cloud Storage Can Make Saving Your Crucial Files Simpler
2. Why Online Storage Makes iTunes Obsolete