Pendulous!
When it all started, a computer cost a couple of million 1960s US dollars, and a company or institution generally could afford only one. Everybody had to take turns using it, often in the wee hours of the morning. Then came timesharing, dumb remote dialup terminals and operating systems that enabled multiple users to access the computer simultaneously.
Then came the minicomputer: less powerful but cheaper by a bigger factor, and a department could afford one, so it was back to taking turns, but at least by a smaller group. The minis became timesharable by a few users, but soon after came the professional desktop workstation and the less-powerful but much cheaper desktop personal computer. The paradigm of the day was an unshared computer for everybody and no waiting.
But that made it hard to share data, and so ensued an ever-changing series of networking technologies, starting with dial-up BBSs and going from there, to the world wide web, initially for somewhat limited purposes, then generalising to cloud computing for everything.
We were centralised again, and sharing was easy. It also meant not nearly so much local power was needed, so cheaper, lesspowerful thin clients and netbooks appeared at the users’ end.
Now, the latest paradigm shift is edge computing, where we move away from centralised, shared computational, storage and networking hardware resources, and place more power at the edge. Less waiting and maybe cheaper hardware? Does anybody notice the pattern? It’s only because I’m old enough to have seen it all? Will it stabilise some day? RodneyBates,StrongCity,KS,USA
Neil says: Thanks for your insightful letter. I think you’re spot on here, what I would add is edge computing is taking advantage of the new generation of ultra-low cost ARMbased SoCs that are enabling networked data collection in areas that wasn’t possible before. But it’s all part of the wonderful cycle of invention, innovation and implementation. It’ll be interesting to see what effect of the next-generation of ultra-low power use ARM servers have on the market.