Re:RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)
by maaarghk on Saturday March 13, 2021 @02:00AM
(#26444635)
On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".
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And the return to timesharing systems.
Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?
I once saw a fascinating quote that went something like the following:
"As computing technology develops it becomes more efficient to take centralised computing resources and distribute them closer to the user. As network technology develops it becomes more efficient to centralise them again. Further advances redistribute and yet further advances recentralise. This pattern has been noticed several times in the history of computation."
And the most fascinating thing was that it was from decades ago, perhaps even 1960! I've never been able to find the quote again. Does anyone recognise it? Perhaps I imagined it.
I dont know the exact quoter but the phenomena has been noticed and commented on maaaany times; I remember reading dilbert jokes about it in the 90s.
Can you give examples of "Further advances redistribute"?
Also, I wonder if commodity cloud offerings such as AWS will change this?
Mainframes -> home pcs -> laptop -> smartphone, all advances miniaturizing and distributing computing closer to the edge
Relevant piece of history on timesharing in relation to cloud computing by the legend that is Brian Kernighan:
https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=340 (05:40 - 10:50)
Indeed, with the browser being a replacement for XWindows, RDP and even SSH/Telnet.