The community didn't reinvent "ASIC". It was my joke, but humour is difficult ... Read the conclusions of my dissertation. Then realize that the cloud is just one form of special-purpose hardware. Then be me trying to tongue-in-cheek claim that I foresaw the potential of rump kernels on the cloud 4 years earlier. Then maybe the joke will be funny. If not, well, you don't get your money back, sorry, your only condolence is that I rarely use the same joke twice.

I still don't see too much similarity between DDE and using full-OS VM's to act as DDE backends. It's like observing that unikernels and traditional timesharing operating systems can both run applications, so they're similar. Yes, but ... Anyway, I understand what you mean, disagree, and don't think it's worth debating further.