There’s been a lot of talk since Apple’s rare pre-announcement of iCloud about what exactly it is. MacRumors linked to this video from a WWDC of ages past, where Steve was talking about Networked Home Folders and the magic it enables.

The funny thing is I spent a large part of 2002 and 2003 setting up exactly what he describes – a networked home folder environment in OSX, using Mac OS X server and client. Worked for me anywhere on the AUS campus – I logged in with the same home folder in my apartment as I did with in any of the offices or labs I sat down in. Mail, bookmarks, iChat history, etc. There is still a modified version of it in use today, I think, with the primary change being NetApp-based storage instead of OSX Server based storage.

In everything I’ve seen, it’s my gold standard for how computing should work.

The only thing close in the consumer space is DropBox. It’s easy to use, it’s seamless, and they have built up a huge customer base willing and able to pay for use of the service. It’s also cross-platform and provides file-by-file, save-by-save revision history. However, it only syncs one folder, and that folder isn’t your home folder. Which means that mail, bookmarks, preferences, and the contents of your desktop don’t follow you around. It’s effectively impossible to manage in a sizable deployment of administrator-controlled environment.

What I want to see is a Hybrid Cloud. One where the contents of the drives attached to your Airport Extreme and/or Mac OS X Lion Server in your house sync up with iCloud, and back down to you wherever you go. Let’s call the hardware the iCloud Device. Make the service Mac-only. Triple DES/AES-256 the hell out of all of it, and store the private key where the user chooses. Charge $0.10/month/GB for storage, synced up to your laptop, iPhone and iPad wherever you are, and charge it as you use it. Let us pay for it out of iTunes. Also, don’t count iTunes-purchased media against the end-user’s quota, as that should already be de-dup’ed in the iTMS, and enable seamless streaming media from it.

Taking it even further, make the iCloud Device a Software Update Server for your home. Use mDNS to auto-discover the update servers, and allow media cachine, iTunes rentals and everything else to sync there in the background. Allow parents to easily manage preferences for user accounts, which apply across the whole personal iCloud. Finally, allow machines to NetBoot from the iCloud Device, and allow delivery of new OS images and TimeMachine restores to happen over the network.

But that’s just my pipe dream. We’ll see what Apple actually releases on Tuesday.