One of the actual killer apps was gaming. Which still "happens" mostly on the client, today, even for networked games.

You know that the personal computer predates the web by quite a few years?

In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back.

This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away.

In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.

Umm... I had a PC a decade before the web was invented, and I didn't even use the web for like another 5 years after it went public ("it's an interesting bit of tech but it will obviously never replace gopher...")

The killer apps in the 80s were spreadsheets and desktop publishing.

It is true that browsers do much more computation than "dumb" terminals, but there are still non-trivial parallels. Terminals do contain a processor and memory in order to handle settings menus, handle keyboard input and convert incoming sequences into a character array that is then displayed on the screen. A terminal is mostly useless without something attached to the other side, but not _completely_ useless. You can browse the menus, enable local echo, and use device as something like a scratchpad. I once drew up a schematic as ascii art this way. The contents are ephemeral and you have to take a photo of the screen or something in order to retain the data.

Web browsers aren't quite that useless with no internet connection, some sites do offer offline capabilities (for example gmail). but even then, the vast majority of offline experiences exist to tide the user over until network can be re-established, instead of truly offering something useful to do locally. Probably the only mainstream counter-examples would be games.

It's still a SAAS, with components that couldn't be replicated client-side, such as AI.

Oh, GMail is definitely a cloud offering---even if they have some offline functionality.

I was just probing the 'content _streaming_' term. As you demonstrate, you'd have to squint really hard to describe GMail as content streaming.

'Offline' vs 'content streaming' is a false dichotomy. There's more different types of products and services.

(Which reminds me a bit of crypto-folks calling everything software that's not in crypto "web2", as if working on stodgy backends in a bank or making Nintendo Switch games has anything to do with the web at all.)