Over the holidays a reader wrote in mourning for a manuscript he had placed on the Google Docs site. Because he had placed his trust totally in "the cloud," he had not backed up the file, and when it disappeared nobody at Google could help him find it. Actually, according to my reader the company wouldn't even respond. I figured they were on vacation.

I blogged the letter and lamented the situation in a podcast. The reader eventually got the document back because his colleague, who was working on the same manuscript, still had his document intact. But it was only after some thought that I realized that none of this was about the cloud. This was about retro computing, the kind we used to do on the mainframe with a terminal. Retro computing—in which data is stored on a centralized system rather than on your own PC and storage media—remains peculiarly attractive to many people.

The loss of data is nothing new. You can hardly expect better when you allow someone other than yourself to have ultimate control. Just recently AOL shut down its Hometown Web sites, and people complained bitterly because they didn't get their data off the system before its abrupt end. Podrango decided to stop giving away bandwidth to podcasters and has given users until the end of the month to get their content off the site or risk losing it. In the late 1990s, as the dot-com crash gathered speed, free services started being shut down one by one, often with no warning. Despite all this, people keep coming back for more agony.

Exactly what is driving retro computing? There's been a movement back to this form of architecture ever since the PC grabbed a foothold on the computing scene and refused to give way to all efforts to remove it. Retro computing has taken many forms, from "client-server" schemes in the 1980s to the ASPs (application service providers) of the 1990s to thin-client computing to "the network is the computer" to "cloud computing." There are dozens of other forays into this architecture, and the results are always a dead end. Well, almost always.

What makes the whole Google Docs thing kind of silly is that loaded computers are more powerful and cheaper than ever. And you can get a terabyte of storage for around $100. How inexpensive can you go?

But no matter how cheap personal storage becomes, people keep gravitating toward giving control to someone other than themselves. This is reflected in society as a whole, and in the current financial crises and various other scams. The Bernie Madoff $50 billion swindle was the best case in point. People would rather trust him with their money than trust themselves. After all, he was a professional.

So, too, with retro computing. People would rather trust Google with their documents than trust themselves. I mean, your house could burn down and take all your files with it, right? And of course, there are security issues with a PC. You could get a virus, and it could destroy your machine and its contents…and so on. Generally speaking, if you feel this way and are fearful I can almost guarantee that you have some malware on your machine at this moment. The malware isn't out to destroy your machine but to send out spam at night on your dime.— Next: Blaming AOL