“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” is a purported 1943 quote from Thomas Watson, IBM’s CEO just before the dawn of the Von Neumann architecture on which all modern computers rely.
Suppose that he actually did say this. Is it fair to say that events in cloud computing have proven him correct? Watson was not talking about terminals (corresponding to our desktop PCs and smartphones), but mainframes, which correspond to computing clouds today. How many clouds of significance are there? AWS, Google, Azure, Alibaba, and IBM? (source) That’s five!
My father was VP of Marketing of Lanzagorta Group, a Mexican manufacturer of oil drilling equipment that started as a HW store in downtown CDMX. With a branch in Houston?. Back in the 70s, he was assigned to figure out if the company needed a computer, most likely a VAX-PDP. He erroneously concluded NO. It cost him his credibility and later quit. He later founded two businesses related to the oil industry and was able to travel in cruise ships all over the world with my sister. He inherited me only his old clothes, many of which I had given him bought in the US$A.
Yes, he was right. PCs still exist, but people use them as dumb terminals and all their data belongs to the five cloud overlords (+ Apple and Facebook).
“Although Watson is well known for his alleged 1943 statement, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” there is scant evidence he said it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attribution
Maybe someday we’ll all take turns on 1 big quantum computer.
In Soviet Russia, Quantum Computer takes turns on you.
Interesting how RSH – based TLS and SSL security – breaking quantum computers are officially at our door but nobody even talks about substituting those protocols with quantum – proof security. What a contrast with one generation ago.
@Anonymous: that’s because quantum computers don’t really work, and probably never will. The machines they are building today are quantum *annealing* computers (aka analog computers), which are only useful for a small set of problems. Crypto cracking quantum computers are science fiction, nobody has ever built a working one.
Bill Gates said no-one needs more than 640k of RAM. Steve Jobs said no-one needs more than one mouse button. Now my PC has 10’s of gigabytes of RAM, but the Macintosh still has only one mouse button.
Wants vs needs.
Ahem. We now have computers in pretty much every gizmo. My toaster has more computing power than some of the mainframes I used to hack back when I was in school.