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> The whole industry has swung from fat clients to thin clients and back since time immemorial. The pendulum will keep swinging after this too. Indeed, graphic
by DougMerritt 2y ago
> The whole industry has swung from fat clients to thin clients and back since time immemorial. The pendulum will keep swinging after this too.
Indeed, graphics pioneer and all-around-genius Ivan Sutherland observed (and named) this back in 1968:
"wheel of reincarnation
"[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
"Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of Samsara, and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter."
https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht...
- justanotherjoe 2y agoThat was why i stopped using the word 'tech' to refer to these things. You don't suddenly go back to stop using the wheel after a time, or suddenly think that printing press was a bad idea after all. Those are techs. Many of the things we call techs nowadays are just paradigms. And frameworks are defnitely not 'new technology'.
- wolvesechoes 2y ago> Many of the things we call techs nowadays are just paradigms More like fads sold to milk even more money from people.
- artikae 2y agoAll it takes for something to be replaced is something that does the job better. You can only really apply your definition in hindsight, after something has stood the test of time. You can't tell the difference between sails and wheels until after the rise of the steam engine.
- anthk 2y agoAlso http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...