There's not much new under the sun. Virtual machines were created in the 1960s, for example.
The wisdom I was given by an old hand is that the computer industry goes through a cycle of focus: disk, network, CPU - at any given time the currently 'hot' technology is targeting one of these hot spots.
I am not sure I have lived long enough to see this play out for myself but it seemed that there was some truth to it when I first heard it.
You're absolutely correct. Had this moment w/ my dad, when I started playing around with early VMware and excitedly told him about it and he was like "Well, yeah we use that all the time at work. It's called VM/370" (current: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/VM but see list of historical versions)
What I just really dislike is all the fanfare and marketing blah. It seems that we can't have a proper conversation about such things. Performance and bottlenecks are always the same. Something is your current bottleneck. You focus on getting rid of that bottleneck and you discover the next bottleneck. There is always one. People will always take advantage of the bottleneck removed and hit the next one. Can't we just openly talk about the fact that we've removed one and the new bottleneck is of a different 'type' (like you say, disk, network, CPU). Do we always have to pretend like something truly new has been found? Can't we acknowledge what we're really doing there?
Different thing, same vein: The recent posts on here about finite automata (aka state machines). These are the bread and butter of computer science. You learn about those in every computer science 101. And in 101.2 you learn about pushdown automata because finite automata can't do everything you might need (i.e. they can't count). Yet the discussion here and the linked articles and frameworks linked to sound like they're completely novel.
It might not be the same. You see, context and surrounding technolgy changes rapidlly and so ideas that were not feasible 50 years ago (or had some other type of problem) might be feasible today.
History can't repeat because underlying technology always moves forward and that change is so important that it invalidates almost anything to be clasified as total repete.
I don't claim that it's a total repeat. I say I don't like the fact that the opposite is often claimed, i.e. that something is "totally new". Emphasis on "totally". Can you give specifics?
You are right in that technology changes and different things that were not possible become possible or become mainstream accessible. What I don't like is the complete ignorance of what came before because of marketing. Don't get me wrong, I get it in that sense. It only sells well when you make everyone believe it's the best thing since sliced bread and that you just invented it out of thin air. I don't have to like that though.
We start out with sequential reads being faster for example. Think tape drives and how file formats and search algorithms got optimized for sequential reads being faster. Then hard drives come along where you can suddenly do much faster 'random reads' simply because searching is so much faster in comparison and people take advantage of it. But then you build enough functionality on top of that sudden ability to do random reads relatively fast that it does become the bottleneck and you instead organize things on your HDD such that they result in sequential reads instead. Along come SSDs, which are so much faster overall that you don't have to any longer. Until it repeats and your workloads bottleneck on even an SSDs abilities. But the idea of organizing your files in a certain way or taking advantage of the read characteristics of your storage aren't completely novel at all.
Or take databases. We start out with accessing data by key only, because it's faster. You need to know your access pattern beforehand if you want things to be fast. Someone comes along and invents relational databases and it becomes possible to actually do that in a 'fast enough' way as well because of hardware advances. Suddenly someone else comes along way later and re-invents accessing data by key only if you need 'real speed' (aka NoSQL databases).
Or like in another thread where someone claimed 'the cloud' invented node independent re-attachable networked storage. No they didn't. I'm not sure if that's the earliest but it's the earliest I know of, which are EMC^2 Symmetrix and that was way pre-cloud i.e. in the 1990s. SANs are/were a thing for a long time. Mainstream access to such technologies by simply renting an EC2 instance w/ EBS volumes is something the cloud did give us though.
You mean FSMs? I don't really have any links about those, no. I learned about them in university. That's been a while and all of that info was in paper form. But I'm sure there are great online resources nowadays.
Just in general I do see in my history this which came through HN a while ago. I never read any of that but it seems a lot like what we did in computer science in uni from a cursory glance: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html
> the computer industry goes through a cycle of focus: disk, network, CPU - at any given time the currently 'hot' technology is targeting one of these hot spots
SSR makes me think we’re going back to doing everything on the server, after quite a few years focusing on the client. I think this might be the third go-around in my career.
Network, and to a lesser extent: CPU (or more generally, compute) in large scale deployments as a result of possibilities enabled by networking. We’re calling this the cloud, but the first iteration of “the cloud” started with storage enabling efficient, reliable access of data storage being decoupled from individual nodes. Now we take that for granted- so maybe the current era is “all of the above, but storage started to feel like a solved problem”
We’re calling this the cloud, but the first iteration of “the cloud” started with storage enabling efficient, reliable access of data storage being decoupled from individual nodes
This is exactly what I dislike about all this "look, shiny, new" kind of thing. No, networked storage that is decoupled from compute nodes is not a cloud thing. Sure the cloud does that too. But data centers all over the globe used EMC^2 Symmetrix for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_Symmetrix
I wish every CS curriculum had a mandatory course on the history of CS.
Covering how many times the same ideas have been "new" and then discarded as not useful, only to be rediscovered. It could help reduce the amount of churn in the industry, so we can move forward instead of forgetting and relearning the same things over and over.
It's after the year 2000 - definitely a joke on Bret's part. He is very big on keeping computer history alive and contextualizing things.
You're meant to pretend Bret is giving the presentation in 1973; e.g. his comment about "but there's no way Intel will corner the market and stifle innovation, right?"
The wisdom I was given by an old hand is that the computer industry goes through a cycle of focus: disk, network, CPU - at any given time the currently 'hot' technology is targeting one of these hot spots.
I am not sure I have lived long enough to see this play out for myself but it seemed that there was some truth to it when I first heard it.