[ErroneousBosh]

AR/VR, cryptocurrency, fractal compression schemes, transputers, VLIW, "low code" in various forms for 40-odd years.

You know what remains? Thumping great Unix boxes running relational databases, same as they ever were.

I'm currently advising some rainbow-haired alphabet soup group annoying children with strong views about neopronouns about what they can base the software backend for their startup - which looks good incidentally - on because they've chosen to go with a thumping great Debian box running Postgres, and to do that they've sought the counsel of some grumpy old Gandalf-beard 50-something with boringly conventional pronouns, mostly grey hair, and strong opinions about real ale.

There's no AI in it, they're just doing it with all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity, and it works well.

[wcoenen]

Those "Thumping great Unix boxes" (or indeed even integrated circuits) didn't exist before the sixties. So it seems that technological revolutions do occur from time to time.

[ErroneousBosh]

Yeah, but everything since then has been evolutionary.

There's nothing really new in computing at the moment. We've made transistors smaller so memory is denser and processors are faster. We've made better batteries. Really the big step change was flash memory and Li-Ion.

What's the Big New Thing going to be, what's the 21st Century's PDP11 going to be?