Mainframe to Stand-Alone to Client/Server to Web - The Full Circle

This is an observation that may seem so obvious that it does not need writing. Then again, I have not read it elsewhere, so here goes...

In the sixties and seventies the corporate computing environment was dominated by mainframes. These big monsters required regular feeding of funds and staff. As business began to rely on the information processing they provided, the emerging IT departments gained more and more power. Is this reading like a bad fantasy novel yet?

Then came 1980 (It was hard not to notice, the hair was so bad). IBM had looked at the geeky micro-computer market and seen a cheaper and more flexible terminal to connect to their mainframes. Those of us using micro-computers at the time were not impressed. Their hybrid 8/16 bit 8088 was much slower than the second generation Z80s we were using - and way more expensive.

But we were stupid. The thing was, it wasn't about the technology - that can always be improved - it was about the culture. The guys with suites bought them by the dozen: they saw freedom from the control the IT department had been exerting. By the time Lotus had taken the Visicalc idea and made it work with big sheets of data, the market was set. Rather than the intelligent mainframe workstation with a bit of word processing thrown in that IBM had envisaged, office workers were running their own programs to get the work done locally.

The two armies faced off, and the battle raged. Desktops sprouted databases (DBASE) and 4GL solutions. The mainframer fought back with client server applications, a sort of compromise that would leave IT departments back in charge. Client/server was a failure. It was a lot more expensive to develop than mainframe-only and had severe reliability problems. While it had better looks it was as slow as we were used to for mainframe applications.

And then the popular front did themselves in. They got all excited about an information presentation technology called the Internet. This is not a criticism of the Internet, but where we saw information at our fingertips, the IT Department saw servers under their control sending information to terminals under their control (called browsers this time).

Almost every enterprise application in the last 7 years has been web-based - meaning application servers with nothing but a browser on your super-comptuter of a desktop.

Is it just me, or have we come full circle in the last 25 years? Sure the browser has replaced the dumb terminal and the IBM mainframe by the Sun Solaris server, but what else has really changed? It looks a lot prettier, but we are waiting just as long for a page to load now as we did then. We work on enterprise systems where 4 seconds between pressing a button and getting a display is acceptable. How would you like it if Word or Excel behaved this way?

Whatever happened to distributed processing?