Computing Came Full Circle
When I started in this business, the old-timers talked about the mainframe the way people talk about a first car. Everything lived in one big machine in a cold room. You sat at a dumb terminal — a screen and a keyboard with no brain of its own — and the center did all the thinking. If the center went down, everybody went home.
Then the PC killed that world, and good riddance, we said. The computer on your desk got more powerful every year. The thinking moved out to the edge, to the person. Software shipped in boxes. Every office grew a closet with a server in it, and every company became its own little computer center whether it wanted to or not.
Look where we are now. Amazon rents computing by the hour out of giant data centers — its service just became a real, guaranteed product last month. Google runs your mail and your documents from buildings full of machines you will never see. We have a name for it: the cloud. Strip the marketing off and it is the mainframe again — computing as a utility, delivered from the center, paid by the drink. The wheel turned all the way around, and we are walking back voluntarily, credit card in hand.
Except for one difference, and it is not small. The terminal is not dumb anymore. The laptop in my bag out-computes the mainframes the old-timers brag about, and the phone in my pocket is a computer the seventies would not have believed. We went back to the center carrying supercomputers.
Working at EMC, I watch this from the storage side, where the data tells the story before the strategy decks do: more of the world’s information lives in the center every quarter, and my company sells the center. My bet: the center keeps growing, but the edge never gives its power back. That argument — who does what, center or edge — runs for the rest of my career. I intend to bill for both sides of it.
We spent thirty years escaping the mainframe. It turns out we were just waiting for it to get good enough to come back to.