> Yet, in many ways, the world we are in today is actually intensely terminal based. At the same time, I feel that in many cases that’s because it’s easier to

> Yet, in many ways, the world we are in today is actually intensely terminal based. At the same time, I feel that in many cases that’s because it’s easier to bill users as a provider of terminals instead of a provider of personal computers. Depending on interest rates, being billed for connecting by terminal can also be more attractive to a business. For the absolute overwhelming majority of businesses, there is zero reason to deal with the failure modes and resulting tremendously complex engineering that comes with running the infrastructure for Amazon. (It’s not that, for example, the small number of computers they need can’t fail, it’s that, unlike Amazon, they’d need to plug a lot of other much more probable disaster-planning holes before the probability of such failure rises above the noise.) Yet many do. For the absolute overwhelming majority of individuals, their file-sharing needs do not require a distributed storage system sized for Google. Yet many use one. And then they have to deal with the fact that they are small enough that Amazon’s and Google’s infrastructure could literally never work for them and still not cause even the slightest dent in the overall uptime percentage[1]. [1] http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/