Evolution of Computing

Yesterday during a conversation with one of my grad students, we discussed the evolution of computing and the movement from centralized computing to distributed client server and now back to centralized systems.  This shift is commonly referred to as the pendulum swinging between centralized and decentralized architecture.  However, the student noted a reference to this phenomena as a spiral rather than a pendulum swing.  The explanation was the pendulum infers going back to an original state.  In this case, shifts back to centralized computing have resulted in a similar architecture but different than the original state.

I like the spiral model for describing what is occurring with the fluctuation in system architectures.  We began with the centralized mainframe, migrated to distributed client server, moved to centralized web pages, and then shifted to decentralized AJAX web applications.  These changes demonstrated an oscillation between centralized and decentralized architectures but also resulted in improvements over the deficiencies of prior architectures.

What I find interesting now is the increasing use of apps.  These apps we run on our devices are the equivalent of the decentralized client sever architecture.  We have migrated back to distributing the processing load and creating applications that run on each individual client.  However, in this latest iteration of distributed architecture, we now have better means of disseminating the latest edition of the software.  The apps stores have the ability to push out upgrades to these apps which is far superior to the old client server architecture which required manual installations at each workstation for each upgrade.

It will be interesting to see where we end up as the spiral continues to oscillate between centralized and decentralized architectures.