Everything has a beginning. Over the Christmas Holiday I set up a Raspberry Pi for my grandson. Last week I met up with several techie oriented friends and we compared notes on the impact of "big data", the power of the phone or tablet we all carry around and the almost absurd existence of the Rapsberry Pi, a £30 ($50) computer more powerful than most large systems (i.e. Datacentre computers) of 20 years ago.
For my sins, I am the oldest of the group so I've worked on everything from DEC PDP-8 powered numerical tools, through the introduction of VAX 11/780 (the computer that defined the MIP) and the Amdahl 470V/6, the most powerful commercial computer of its day. Since then I went the micro-processor route starting with Intel MDS (8080 based) through Z80, 8086 and up to the x86-x64 architectures which power most of the computers in use today. On the journey I've worked on Sun SPARC, IBM Power and MIPS (what?) all of which have had their day.
To put some perspective on this in 1980 an Amdahl V6 with 8Mb of memory cost $6M, by the time you added a string of 80Mb disk drives and a data-centre, the all up cost of a decent system was >$10M. A modern mobile phone has >50x the processing power 120x the memory and 20x-40x the storage. The Amdahl ran an airline or car manufacturer, we play Angry Birds!
Back to the Raspberry Pi, by today's standards it's a low end system, but 15 years ago it would have powered a city dealing room or a major airline's on-line reservation system. The progress of computing is inexorable but the, perhaps sad, reality is that most processors spend their time presenting graphics rather than manipulating data. Most of the power of our user technology drives the screen or calculates the trajectories of imaginary weapons in shoot-em-up games.
But there is a second world, the world of internet servers and their back-end systems
