I've tracked these changes for 25 years and noticed that there are cyclical cadences. I started off writing about the home computer boom of the 80s, moved to the world of business technology and now find I am writing as much about consumer products as I ever did. What has changed is that these products are now being applied to business applications.
I started writing about mainframes and minicomputers. Common phrases would be glasshouses, time-sharing, bureau services, green screen, and disk arrays. In the 90s I wrote about distributed systems, data warehousing and the like. Today, it's data centres, cloud services, thin clients and disk farms.
The cycles all have different cadences. We have distributed systems, mixed with data centre technology, cloud and mobile phones. Like cast runes, the next throw gives a different configuration.
Even social change has an influence. The digital generation not only readily adopt new technologies but also expect to adapt their ever-changing personal skills to their working environment. It's the Lego-mentality where everything must click-fit or be discarded.This blog will catalogue change but at heart will be the jottings of a freelance journalist trying to make sense of the technologies and influences. At times I will rave about the genius if what, in the end, turns out to be a dead-end technology. I will rail against inevitability. Sometimes, I may get it right.
In a world where marketing often holds sway, nothing is clear cut. Just as Betamax video tape was supplanted by the inferior VHS standard, we have seen great technology displaced by well-marketed mediocrity time after time. Price, perception or just a well-chosen product name are some of the influences that confound the prediction business.
Enough scene setting and back to a ramble through the metropoli, villages, and wild and windy spaces of the IT world.
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