The mainframe is back, with a new name. Does anyone remember the client server holy war? All the software processing was to be done on the client desktop.
My desktop PCs are the mini supercomputers of yore.
I can run my own Climate Model at home. It’s totally kool.
Kudos to Bell Labs, TI, & Intel....
Having worked in the IT industry for 38 years, in my last job I told all the younger IT Engineers on the team who were half my age that, what is new now, was old at one time and what is old now will be new again in the future...
They thought I was a dinosaur....
The cloud now is just a new name for a mainframe running payroll, AP, AR, GL, etc...
In between then and now you had something called Windows Terminal Services and Citrix...combined with machines called Thin Clients which were essentially dumb terminals connected to a mainframe.....
It all goes in cycles..
Yes, and it’s a pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth - forever getting clients to buy more hardware or software, to keep IT nerds like me in a job.
Hopefully, I can last another 15 years (been doing IT stuff, originally SCO Xenix and Unix, now routing/switching/wireless/firewalls/VPN/MPLS/DWDM/IoT) since 1993. I’m looking to retire in the next 10 - 15 at the MOST.
Oh yeah. Tech seems to move in cycles, like many other things. I've worked on hardware that was just a generation or so from having tubes in it. The HP-1000 had 16 rockers on the front panel so that you could actually program the bootloader and other things in binary.