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So what? Sometimes ideas have to be reinvented, maybe this time they succeed. There could be two reasons why old ideas (talking about Software here) didnt succe

• Sharlin 6y ago
  You're still assuming a linear model of history. My point was that history is cyclical, the same trends come and go. Static vs dynamic typing. Thin client vs thick client. Local vs distributed. Key-value vs relational. Monolithic vs micro*. And so on. Yes, sometimes these have to do with changing requirements or hardware capabilities, but more often they're just about a new generation wanting shiny new things rather than boring old things. Except that the shiny new things were the boring old things of the previous iteration. Many ideas of the yesteryear were not bad or even infeasible, indeed they were successfully put into real-world use. Until the tide changed and they became unfashionable for whatever reason. And then they became fashionable again, but without a view of the history there's little synthesis of ideas, little learning from past experiences beyond the current cycle.
  • jonjacky 6y ago
    This cycle was called the "Wheel of Reincarnation" in this 1968 paper by Myer and Sutherland about display processors. http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...