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btw Futurama's writers were paraphrasing this: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 (of course i
by drzaiusapelord 5y ago
btw Futurama's writers were paraphrasing this:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
(of course in 1943 that was a totally reasonable thing to think considering they were the size of a small house and ran on thousands of vacuum tubes that needed constant replacing and started in the millions of dollars)
- dr_dshiv 5y agoIronically, that's about how many major cloud providers exist (AWS, MS, Google,...)
- pavlov 5y agoAnd it’s come full circle because today the majority of the Western world’s computing needs are served by five computers: Google’s, Facebook’s, Apple’s, Microsoft’s and Amazon’s. Each of them consists of millions of individual devices, but the end user posting to Instagram or accessing their iCloud files doesn’t need to know any of that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 5y agoSure, if you ignore the issue of how the user accesses them. Even if you pretend the user has a dumb terminal, that's 5 computers that can each serve a hundred million users at once. Very very different from batch processing. Also the original quote was about preorders for a single model in the united states.
- kortilla 5y agoThat’s a pretty ridiculous stretch given that I have more than 5 computers in my home that all work without talking to any of those FAANG datacenters.