Rapid Graffiti

I’ve been watching a couple of sci-fi movies.   ”Back to the future” being one of them.  The other series that i’m watching is called “The Triangle” and it focuses on the famous Bermuda Triangle.  “Back to the future” series pictures adventures of a prof who builts a car that has a time machine, and along with the prof is his friend/colleague called Matty. 

“Back to the Future” somehow looks appropriate to what is happening to computing in general. 

IBM introduced the first transistorized mainframe somewhere in mid 50s.  It introduced System/360 on April 7, 1964.  That was a move away from mainframes to “family” of computers.  1950s, ’60s and even ’70s belonged to centralized computing.  You had to connect to the server in order to process data, and get things done.

Microsoft launched windows in 1980s, and the changes got noticed.  The power started getting distributed in what was claimed as the era of distributed computing.  Workstations were getting more powerful, and each pc had power enough to get its own work done, and store it for future reference, without the help of central computer.  The operating system started getting more and more powerful.  Applications were developed keeping in mind the personal computer.  Hence, things were moving away from centralized computing.

But it seems we’re taking a U-turn (Atleast some of us are…)  Thin computing seems to be the key word.  Rajesh Jain mentioned about thing computing on his blog.  Thin computing can save tons of dollars in infrastructure cost.  It can also be a boon to developing nations like India. (heard about Simputer? )  On the application side, the ASP model seems to be picking up.  Salesforece.com is a successful story.  Oracle, SAP, Ariba, and a lot of other major software companies have on-demand solutions model co-existing with license based model.  Isn’t all this,in a way, a U-turn to centralized or server based computing?