The Cambrian Explosion (1969-1999)

In the beginning there was UNIX.

Historians will correctly point out that there were computers before UNIX (1969). These historians are technically correct, which, as every IT professional knows, is the worst kind of correct.

Before UNIX lay the Mainframe Era, a mysterious geological period populated by refrigerator-sized computers, punched cards, magnetic tape, and system operators who possessed powers indistinguishable from magic. Little documentation survives because it was printed on green-and-white tractor-feed paper that has since fossilized.

A few years after UNIX emerged from the primordial command line, personal computers (PCs) began evolving at an astonishing rate. There were strange evolutionary dead ends: The Altair 8800. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The TRS-80. The Apple II. The Atari ST. The Commodore 64. And countless others that competed fiercely for dominance before natural selection intervened in the form of accountants.

By the early 1990s, only a few species remained. Apple retreated into a protected ecological niche where it survived by charging considerably more for essentially the same nutrients while IBM-compatible PCs reproduced with such enthusiasm that every office eventually contained several hundred of them.

During that same time, we saw the rise of client-server computing. Most clients were PCs, while servers evolved as smaller descendants of the mainframe that served clients across a computer network. Like modern birds descended from dinosaurs, they were smaller and faster, yet somehow still capable of terrifying junior administrators.

Networks of the era communicated using telephone lines, producing elaborate mating calls known as modem handshakes. Younger readers may assume this was simply an annoying sound effect. In reality, that was two computers politely screaming at one another until they agreed how to exchange data at approximately the speed modern browsers load advertisements.

Office servers were magnificent beasts. Banyan VINES, Novell NetWare, DEC VMS, SCO UNIX, and others roamed corporate offices like enormous herbivores grazing upon Ethernet cables. Today their bones can occasionally be found in nerd basements (including my own) beside CRT monitors and cables whose original purpose no one remembers.

Then Tim Berners-Lee inadvertently created the Web. His stated goal was to help researchers share documents. Humanity instead concluded that it would be an excellent place to upload animated GIFs, conspiracy theories, and eventually videos of cats falling off furniture (this outcome was probably inevitable). Web browser vendors entered an evolutionary arms race in which each attempted to convince web developers that standards were merely suggestions.

Money flooded into anything containing “.com.” Companies with no products, no revenue, and occasionally no employees achieved billion-dollar valuations. Investors eventually noticed.

The Age of the Internet (2000 to present):

By this time, nearly everyone was on the Internet (in North America, at least), and Windows XP evolved into one of computing’s most successful life forms (it survived so long that some organizations continued running it until approximately three operating systems after it had officially died). Organizations also concluded that security should rely primarily on requiring employees to remember increasingly impossible passwords every ninety days. Historians remain divided on whether this improved security or simply increased the number of sticky notes attached to monitors.

File sharing flourished. Everyone downloaded music and ripped CDs. LimeWire and BitTorrent became household names. Everyone’s computer also downloaded seventeen viruses, twelve toolbars, and something called BonziBuddy, whose exact purpose remains unknown to science.

Then someone realized that maintaining hundreds of servers in every company basement was expensive. So we moved them into gigantic buildings owned by someone else and called them datacenters. Marketing departments named this revolutionary concept “the cloud,” because “Kevin’s server rack in Toronto” lacked sufficient poetic grandeur. Underneath the marketing, however, it was still Kevin’s server rack… just somebody else’s Kevin.

One physical server became dozens of virtual machines. Each virtual machine became hundreds of containers. Some virtual machines mutated container-like features, and were called MicroVMs. Computer scientists generally avoid thinking too hard about this for fear the recursion might become self-aware.

Every IT professional now owns a home lab. Officially this is for “learning.” In practice it is an expensive method of generating additional systems requiring software updates every Tuesday evening. It is also where retired enterprise hardware goes to enjoy a peaceful retirement that somehow involves even more work than before.

Eventually data and computing power became so abundant that we taught computers to recognize images, generate text, compose music, write code, and occasionally insist that glue belongs on pizza. Naturally, we called it Artificial Intelligence (AI), and every CEO immediately decided their company had been an AI company all along. Before long, every product had AI features, every meeting had an AI agenda item, and every employee had mandatory AI training.

Epilogue:

Looking back, the history of computing is really the history of taking one computer, splitting it into many computers, connecting them together, then inventing increasingly complicated ways to pretend they’re one computer again.

We carry supercomputers in our pockets with processors thousands of times faster than those that landed humans on the Moon (but used for watching cat videos while standing three feet from the television). And we can video conference instantly with someone on the other side of the planet, generate software using natural language, train billion-parameter neural networks, and stream 4K video to almost anywhere.

Yet somehow the conference room projector still refuses to connect. The printer insists cyan is empty despite having been replaced twice. DNS continues to be both the cause of, and solution to, most networking problems. Barb still replies-all no matter how many times she is reminded. And somewhere, at this very moment, an IT professional is asking, “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” (which, despite everything we’ve invented over the past half century, remains the single most successful troubleshooting algorithm ever discovered).

History suggests that in another fifty years we’ll be managing quantum, photonic, AI-assisted cloud-native edge clusters spanning the Solar System. But every new technology will still begin with someone confidently declaring, “It works on my machine.”

They’ll still have printers. And they’ll still hate them.