Bringing balance to the force
Jul. 13th, 2009 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dsrtaoI was just reading Rob Pike's screed about how operating systems research came to a dead halt (written circa 2000) and came across this line (again):
Bruce Lindsay of IBM: HDLC ~ HTTP/HTML; 3270s have
been replaced by web browsers.
Yeah, early web browsers were like that. All the intelligence resided on themainframeserver side; people stared at terminals and filled in forms.
Web 2.0 and subsequent have been about balancing the computing power between local and remote sides. We all have fantastically powerful CPUs and lots of storage in our pockets; when the bandwidth is bad, we would prefer to use the local resources as much as possible, and when the bandwidth is good, we would still prefer to have as much snappy response as we can, but have the interesting information brought to us from far away.
MMORPGs are good examplars: have the local client do the fancy user interface, and have the remote servers hew wood and haul water. Things will continue to shift.
Bruce Lindsay of IBM: HDLC ~ HTTP/HTML; 3270s have
been replaced by web browsers.
Yeah, early web browsers were like that. All the intelligence resided on the
Web 2.0 and subsequent have been about balancing the computing power between local and remote sides. We all have fantastically powerful CPUs and lots of storage in our pockets; when the bandwidth is bad, we would prefer to use the local resources as much as possible, and when the bandwidth is good, we would still prefer to have as much snappy response as we can, but have the interesting information brought to us from far away.
MMORPGs are good examplars: have the local client do the fancy user interface, and have the remote servers hew wood and haul water. Things will continue to shift.
