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0 pointsjjav2y ago0 comments

I'm not old enough (or been in the appropriate industry) to have worked with mainframes. I started in the heyday of the workstations (Sun, HP-UX, AIX, SGI) as a reaction to the annoyances of mainframes.

Why pay for disk and compute access when you can have a workstation! Why have limited access to the system when you can have your own! Was the vibe.

It is amusing/sad that in the AWS world we're right back to basically mainframes. Centrally hosted massive compute that you don't really have full control or access and have to pay for use time.

I wonder when the next swing back to personal computing arrives?

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2 comments · 2 top-level

hinkley2y ago

You're old enough to have noticed that we cycle between client-server and peer-peer about every decade. Sometimes it's hardware, sometimes it's software.

The pendulum swings, and never seems to stop.

Merrill2y ago

Had the US government not forced IBM to get out of the centralized provision of computing by consent agreements and eventual divestiture, and had the US government not forbidden the Bell System to enter the centralized computing business by the FCCs Computer Inquiry 2, its likely that computing and networking would have evolved in a more rational way that did not include personal computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Bureau_Corporation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Computer_Inquiry

It takes time and wastes effort, but technology eventually bests politicians.

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