Deployment architecture does not define monolithic.

The empirical example is that, say, Shopify and Basecamp both described their applications as monolithic.

However, there's a more comprehensive demonstration, in that we can't define "box" without contradiction. When you consider the many shells of virtualisation we use, the fact that any web application is by definition accessed over a network (and therefore distributed), and the internal architecture of a modern server, which is practically a distributed federation, or even the coordination between threads in a single process, it leads inevitably to contradiction (if you're careful) or just a messy quagmire of conflicting definitions.

The final nail in this dichotomous coffin is that the converse is also untrue, since any microservice-based application can be deployed on one box. Whichever way you look through the scope, deployment model turns out orthogonal to the taxonomy of software architecture.

There is no conflicting definition and I'm not quite sure what your reply is about.

Quite obviously the point is not whether a microservice-based app can be deployed on a single box. It obviously can.

The point is that you split your app in order to deploy different pieces to different boxes then you have a distributed system and no longer a monolith.

My point is that this definition has nothing to do with software, and in fact would mean that the last monolithic system was a Burroughs mainframe ca. 1960. This either invalidates the definition reductio ad absurdum, or confirms it but renders the term basically unusable.

This has everything to do with software and is not about any deployment architecture.

A monolith approach means a single program. This is a software architecture approach and implies by definition that the whole app runs as one in a single box.

I don't understand the point of arguing.

Aside from my desktop calculator there is no computing device or application in operation today that meets the definition of a single program on a single box.

There is indeed no point in arguing about that.

And I’m not even sure about the calculator.

It is quite clear what a monolith approach means. It is well defined. If you build a webapp as, e.g. a Ruby on Rails app you have for practical purposes the whole of your app in a single program. You cannot have a few functions running here and other functions running there. It's all or nothing in the same place. This is not a judgement on the merits of different approach, just a simple statement of fact and I am surprised that this should trigger so much nitpicking and sarcastic put-downs.

It is a Ruby on Rails app.