This was one of those things I saw as a kid just learning about tech that got me interested in parallel processing, high-performance computing, beowulf clusters

This was one of those things I saw as a kid just learning about tech that got me interested in parallel processing, high-performance computing, beowulf clusters. It struck me as odd that seemingly nobody but a few academics were probing how we could take collections of random hardware and turn them into giant generic computing factories to run arbitrary applications on at any scale. It turns out that in order to do that, you sort of had to reinvent how software works. While that was possible, it was hard enough that only very few developers tried to tackle it (SSI clusters, mostly). So somebody else figured out that rather than do all that really hard work that would take years to get right, you could just start your program 100 times on 100 different computers and send each a random request, with all of them using one database and a lot of caching. Poof: "web-scale" is born, and around the same time, a bookseller started providing APIs and renting hardware. It is 20 years later and we are still using the same architecture.