That doesn't mean that the knowledge wasn't there, just that there were different tradeoffs being made back then. I disagree w/ the GP that it's purely about f

That doesn't mean that the knowledge wasn't there, just that there were different tradeoffs being made back then. I disagree w/ the GP that it's purely about fashion, but certainly there distinct pendulums which swing back and forth in our field. IMO that pendulum isn't purely driven by fancy alone (i.e. fashion) but also changes in computing power. For instance the ever driving swing of the local driven/server driven architecture. These days it's called "cloud" but it's gone by other names in the past. At some point the demands of the applications demand too much for the network traffic/network storage/etc and an increasing amount of work is offloaded to the local client. And then, at some point even further in the future there's an advance on the capabilities of remote computing (e.g. network bandwith) and the cycle repeats itself.