bakemono wrote on 2021-06-22, 02:30:
It is PCs that are retro. A personal, general-purpose, stand-alone computer, owned and controlled by the user. The concept is retro.
The current paradigm is disposable devices, tied to a service, tied to a platform, administered remotely, that can do what third parties decide would be sufficiently fashionable for them to do.
Argue about which stop you want to get off at, but it's obvious which way the train is headed.
So things come "full circle", or how it is called ?
What we have now is shockingly similar to the early days of computing.:
There used to be mainframes, called host computers in their role/function, which did all the computational processing.
Users had to work with dumb terminals or teletype writer machines, which were connected via serial ports to the host computer.
Work was done on a time-sharing basis, wereas computing power was provided by priority.
Important users or important applications became more processing power.
I don't know. Personal computers, when new, were praised for their moving away from this old concept.
As time went on, these Personal Computers became more and more connected, but also incorporated their own intelligence.
The internet, as we knew it, was a symbol for this. It was meant to provide information in case of a failure.
With millions of independant PCs around this world, this concept works comparably well.
But I'm not sure what happens if they all rely on a permanent internet connection;
or worse, a permanet internet connection to servers of a single company.
Edit: That fancy client/server concept from the ~90s is similar the old terminal/host concept, too. 😉
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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