It's not the same industry as AWS in the same way as Amazon isn't really the same industry as catalog/mail order businesses of yore (around 1850s I believe that

It's not the same industry as AWS in the same way as Amazon isn't really the same industry as catalog/mail order businesses of yore (around 1850s I believe that began). You could get limited amounts of compute time on a mainframe back in the day, just like you could order flannel and get it delivered in days/weeks. Now you get massive scale compute resources on demand and fresh fruit, veg and almost anything else delivered within an hour. Neither of them are dissimilar from present offerings, but neither are the same industry as their predecessors.