[tome]

I once saw a fascinating quote that went something like the following:

"As computing technology develops it becomes more efficient to take centralised computing resources and distribute them closer to the user. As network technology develops it becomes more efficient to centralise them again. Further advances redistribute and yet further advances recentralise. This pattern has been noticed several times in the history of computation."

And the most fascinating thing was that it was from decades ago, perhaps even 1960! I've never been able to find the quote again. Does anyone recognise it? Perhaps I imagined it.

[hobs]

I dont know the exact quoter but the phenomena has been noticed and commented on maaaany times; I remember reading dilbert jokes about it in the 90s.

[Chris2048]

Can you give examples of "Further advances redistribute"?

Also, I wonder if commodity cloud offerings such as AWS will change this?

[feteru]

Mainframes -> home pcs -> laptop -> smartphone, all advances miniaturizing and distributing computing closer to the edge