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Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?
by Yoric 6y ago
Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?
- tome 6y agoI once saw a fascinating quote that went something like the following: "As computing technology develops it becomes more efficient to take centralised computing resources and distribute them closer to the user. As network technology develops it becomes more efficient to centralise them again. Further advances redistribute and yet further advances recentralise. This pattern has been noticed several times in the history of computation." And the most fascinating thing was that it was from decades ago, perhaps even 1960! I've never been able to find the quote again. Does anyone recognise it? Perhaps I imagined it.
- Chris2048 6y agoCan you give examples of "Further advances redistribute"? Also, I wonder if commodity cloud offerings such as AWS will change this?
- feteru 6y agoMainframes -> home pcs -> laptop -> smartphone, all advances miniaturizing and distributing computing closer to the edge
- hobs 6y agoI dont know the exact quoter but the phenomena has been noticed and commented on maaaany times; I remember reading dilbert jokes about it in the 90s.
- pjmlp 6y agoIndeed, with the browser being a replacement for XWindows, RDP and even SSH/Telnet.
- waheoo 6y agoYou mean the thing that is literally just managed hosting rebranded with new shiny?
- not_knuth 6y agoRelevant piece of history on timesharing in relation to cloud computing by the legend that is Brian Kernighan: https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=340 https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=340 (05:40 - 10:50)