A common misconception is that the limiting factor for new
technologies are the computers they are running on. It’s
understandable because many of us (myself included) grew up
before the Internet and the cloud. Computing paradigms have been
through many evolutions, and evolving yet again. This new
evolution actually is a throwback to an older computing model.
In the 1970s and early 1980s we had the age of the Mainframe.
Mainframe computers were very expensive and were the size of a
room so companies could only afford to have one. In order to let
many people use them, a machine called a Terminal was invented.
This is basically a monitor and a keyboard that then connected
to the mainframe. You were able to use it like a computer but
the real computation was happening on the big machine. What is
important to note here is network performance was much better
than computational performance. In other words it was cheaper to
do it this way. Ironically, even though the mainframe itself was
expensive, overall IT costs