Well, in the seventies IBM mainframes had the Control Program (CP) and what is now the z/VM hypervisor, so yes precisely the same paradigm was dominant in architecting systems back then.
Sure, squint hard enough and it's the "precisely the same." Being in a virtualization/utility-computing job for the last five years, I've heard this kind of quip over and over and I agree with it on the surface but it's true only in the most general ways.
I guess I was not specific enough above with simply saying "remote virtual machines." With a credit card almost anyone can rent thousands of machines programatically (with redundancy across multiple datacenters if you want) and be using them in minutes. And make them go away just as quickly. And construct the VMs themselves programatically or by hand on a laptop. And the people renting out the hardware don't need to even trust you. All of this is a new development that changes the way business is done. Like I said above, you can say everything is "just" logic gates plus electricity and claim nothing new ever happens (and I'll agree with you, too, I just won't think the conversation is going anywhere interesting).
