Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc Subject: Re: DEC and The Americans Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 11:18:01 -0800 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 33 Message-ID: <87oac9eady.fsf@garlic.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="9a6c8ce24fcd2caeb84dd64e0fa6007c"; logging-data="6668"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+ZmBSYV7MoQmpk1JuRDSojAYZbqHtKoZc=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:aov1H63HRXS6dM0j/oLmISDT1cE= sha1:3CIxXR4sEU7rv4XyuyzsH8QwBoQ= Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:157650 comp.misc:10127 Rich writes: > The current 'cloud' is just yet another example of the pendulum > swinging between "centralized computing resources" and "distributed > computing resources[1]". It's happened before, it will happen again. > The next 'thing' will look a bit different, and will obviously have a > different _marketing_ name, but it is all the same-old same-old when > looked at through the skeptical eye. note necessarily strictly centralized ... but can be some degree of sharing (peaks & lows of useage can occur differently, online time-sharing from 60s was tracking peaks&lows across time-zones in the US, 10am peak on the east coast happened before west coast even started). The trade-off then is the overhead of shared processing versus not-needing to provision every non-shared resource for peak load. Mainframe shared resources at the time of IBM/PC was also slow to track better price/performance technology ... IBM/PCs were tracking new technologies much faster than large mainframes. Lots of clouds are now doing frequent turn-over of enormous numbers of "pc" grade technology ... as a trade-off between the two. Cloud volume has even gotten to the point where the "PC" technology makers are doing custom versions/chips specifically for that market. They have even optimized system costs to the point that power&environmental has become increasing dominate cost factor. Less & less system price/performance, but increasingly watts/performance ... it led to threats that big clouds would move to ARM (power use having been optimized for battery) ... until the I86 makers started paying more attention to watts/performance (systems can be throw-away when next generation saves them more in power than cost of system). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970