At first, there was the mainframe and all was good.
Then Sun pushed out SPARC boxes with 3 mouse buttons (don't even LOOK at those let alone touch those sayeth the sysadmin)
Then we moved everything server side to the cloud, and virtualize everything in our dev environments.
In the future, I predict that things will come around full circle: quantum computing will bring us back to the Big Iron days of "don't even look at it, don't even touch it" but given cooling requirements of QCs these days you won't ever see it.
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again."
Imagine your datacenter is in a container floating in space. Nuclear-powered, advanced magnetic shielding, physically secure in Jupiter orbit, and networked to Earth with quantum entanglement networking.
I can remember going to the computer lab at Berkeley (would have been '89 or '90 probably) and seeing SPARC stations for the first time. Sexiest things ever. Huge monitors (at least they seemed huge back then), and those three button mice...with no trackball!
There's a whole lot of hate going around for a company offering Gigabit Internet to residential subscribers for $80/month. Whether it's oversubscribed with caps on utilization or not, it's offering 1024 MB DL speed for $80/month.
And you all are COMPLAINING about that in a "you're not the boss of me" kind of way, ranting about how QoS limitations violates "net neutrality", etc etc. Seriously?
Then Sun pushed out SPARC boxes with 3 mouse buttons (don't even LOOK at those let alone touch those sayeth the sysadmin)
Then we moved everything server side to the cloud, and virtualize everything in our dev environments.
In the future, I predict that things will come around full circle: quantum computing will bring us back to the Big Iron days of "don't even look at it, don't even touch it" but given cooling requirements of QCs these days you won't ever see it.
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again."