Honestly, this is more like the revenge of the mainframes. Having enough logic in all your storage and peripherals that the hardware itself presented a nice, d

Honestly, this is more like the revenge of the mainframes. Having enough logic in all your storage and peripherals that the hardware itself presented a nice, directly usable API was the thing that differentiated mainframes in the era when minicomputer were cheaper and started getting faster cpus. (That and "no-one's ever gotten fired for buying IBM".)