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The offset press and the mimeograph were both document duplication technologies that had long, successful, broad usage. Both died of lack of operators, not lack
by h2odragon 4y ago
The offset press and the mimeograph were both document duplication technologies that had long, successful, broad usage. Both died of lack of operators, not lack of machines to operate.
The desktop computer has been surpassed by other less flexible data terminals as those older printing technologies were. Similarly, there will be people for whom the fit of capabilities (and lack of need for new investment) will keep the older technologies extant if not vibrant for a long time past their actual economic death.
We now live in the world that Sun wanted: a small market for massively expensive "worksations", more market for bigger "servers" with no UI; and commodity, disposable, mostly read only terminals for the masses.
- mike_hearn 4y agoWell, the Sun vision was that everyone could remote to a workstation in the cloud using a very cheap almost brainless terminal that understood card based SSO, but that workstation you saw was using the standard UNIX desktop environment with filing systems, clipboards, command lines etc. What we've got now is almost the reverse: we pay for quite expensive machines that have those things and then remote the app UI backwards. The server spends relatively little resources on our requests and doesn't think in terms of pixels at all, whilst our machines spend a lot of resources doing graphical heavy lifting. And instead of all the user's data being brought together in one place (the file system) it's all scattered in different databases the users don't have access to.
- Dalewyn 4y ago[flagged]