Mainframe terminals, or keyboards and monitors attached to a big piece of iron in a subbasement somewhere, probably built by IBM or DEC. While proponents of what until recently was called server-side computing have now opted for the friendly-sounding "cloud computing" moniker, let's not forget that Google has built some of the biggest iron around, fulfilling an even more ancient prophesy from the days of punch cards and vacuum tubes: that someday, computers would grow so large they would require their own warehouses, and require so much power, you'd have to build them next to dams.

It makes sense from a business model angle. Google can give away open-source browser code all it wants — while keeping its search algorithm and Web index behind doors firmly locked with key cards and biometric scans. When you're not passively paying Google by paging through independent tabs looking at ads, you'll be actively paying Google by using its suite of office productivity applications. The browser is just another loss leader, as evidenced by Google's history of paying everyone from Mozilla to MySpace for traffic acquisition.

Microsoft's model predicated on proprietary code distributed in paper boxes and intellectual property restrictions writ in byzantine end user license agreements has been dated for some time now. By tethering hardware to software and upstaging everyone with design and branding, Apple has done well by maintaining manicured gardens for the wealthy. But it has clearly ceded the business market by shifting focus to consumer devices, and derives much of its hipster cache from vapid anti-establishment rhetoric. IBM, the company that Apple wanted to smash? Doing quite well selling big iron and giving away open-source code, thank you very much.

That's because the cloud computing worldview is one that has much to recommend it to large institutions, and IT guys at large corporations, research universities and in the government all understand it implicitly. Access to the highest level, or root, of a really big system is an awesome power. You can mete out shares of computing resources, invade people's privacy in all sorts of heinous ways and otherwise torment the poor plebes typing away at the terminals like a true autocrat. All those computer science Ph.D.s and technology researchers Google has hired have mainframes in their blood and ambitions far beyond two measly processor cores.

Google is familiarly setting the stage for later dominance: From earning money from Web applications built for Chrome that lease computing power from Google App Engine to providing the very electricity to juice up these massive mainframes. Meanwhile, the faster you flip from tab to tab, the more advertising inventory you create for Google through their sites and through third parties. Hundreds of clicks and impressions in a day from every Internet user worldwide, from when they wake up to check email through their day at the office to when they come home and look up American Idol highlights, whether they use Chrome or not.

So while much innovation has clearly gone into the design and architecture of the new browser, Brin's ideas are nothing new. The practice of running applications and storing data on a centralized server is actually older than operating systems for personal computers. And the dream of vertically integrating all levels of a trade network — of creating a monopoly? Even older than that.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma and Alex Handy)

Kind of like that anonymous complaint about eBay's anticompetitive practices in Australia "accidentally" displaying data which identified Google as the author. If the conspiracy theorists are right about Google blocking access to PayPal through App Engine intentionally, then why not just say that turnabout is fair play after eBay pulled similar stunts to keep Google Checkout off the auction site? That seems easier.

The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire's trick of formatting a message as "code" if it contains literal newline characters.

For starters, more Web applications mean more pages running Google-brokered ads. App Engine also runs on Google's preferred programming language, Python, not PHP or Ruby — meaning the developers of tomorrow now know definitively what scripting environment to work in, and the company's talent pool will grow. But ZDnet might have the winning theory: it will make the cost of acquiring startups much lower for Google.

Take YouTube, for example. The company succeeded partly on the merits of being able to keep its databases running. While other video sharing services wilted under their popularity, while YouTube remained online. But once Google purchased YouTube, it had to invest engineers and time into translating the company's backend into something that would work in their other systems. Next time, the transition will be nearly seamless.

So for the startup ecosystem, developers can either go Google or go elsewhere. And if they go Google and build something successful, there will be a threshhold of traffic where they'll be presented with two choices — either pay to play on Google's servers, or sell to Google. In any but the first scenario, Google is all up in your balance sheet. Doesn't look good for Amazon.com and Oracle, which powers Amazon's SimpleDB.