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Finally, some programming this old fart recognises. Why did it all get so complicated? Yeah, I know. Rose tinted and all that.

• jacquesm 14y ago
  > Why did it all get so complicated? Two words: 'the web'. Slightly longer: we're re-inventing the wheel through a very roundabout path, I think right now we've gone back in time to roughly the mainframe area, it won't be long before someone will invent the mini computer all over again only this time it will be a local cluster in a box. Next after that the PC, a 'personal cluster' with a few 100 nodes the size of the desktop machine you had last year.
  • greenyoda 14y ago
    I don't think it was the web. The pre-web applications with GUI clients running on PCs and servers on mainframes were already pretty complicated (remember Microsoft's ever-changing object APIs, or CORBA?). What made things increasingly complicated was the ever-growing power of computer and communication hardware, which made it possible to create larger and more complex systems. If you're limited by having to run your software on a machine with a total of 256K of memory (like the first machine I used Unix on in 1980), you just can't build something as complex as what you can build today on a cheap laptop.
    • jacquesm 14y ago
      We were building clusters of PCs in the 1980's using arcnet. Those were pretty large and complex systems, they used a very elegant message passing protocol. And that definitely wasn't the only game in town for large and complex systems (but it was one of the most productive ways of constructing those systems with a small team).
  • arethuza 14y ago
    And it's not the first time the mainframe has been re-invented - I remember sitting through a presentation on the technical architecture of SAP (don't laugh) and I thought "it's a software mainframe".