Saturday, August 6, 2016

Technological Advances, or just "degrees of separation"?

I am very sure you have heard about the "Six degrees of Separation" theory as a party-topic or at the office water-cooler. Interestingly, as computer hardware, software, and networking have advanced through the ages, computing has gone through its own "degrees of separation".

In the beginning, everything was one big block - the hardware, the OS, the applications - everything came from the same vendor and ran on the same box that took up the space of a house! Things were simple, it was a close-knit family living in a single room.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1960s, the first "application software" was developed and sold by a third party. This was a major step, since till this point, the business software applications used to be bundled along with the hardware and OS, and no-one thought it could be any other way. Now, the computer hardware companies were joined by a new class of software companies - the Independent Software Vendors. Thus were the giants like Microsoft born.

Meanwhile, the dumb terminal had separated from the mother-ship, and we were on to the next era of separation - the client-server era! This hardware separation was soon copied into software-side separation too, and voila, we had our "two-tier architecture"! Well, three is always better than two, right? At least the architecture pundits thought so, and stretched the two-tier architecture to create the new "three-tier-architecture", leading the English dictionary to create space for a new word in our vocabulary - "middleware".

Things were going well with the three-tier world for some time, and then the industry was bitten by the separation bug again. We started hearing about "distributed" systems. Everything could now be distributed - services, servers, databases, disks - and they could be distributed around the room, around the data center, or across larger LAN/WAN setups. We were now in the world of "n-tier" architecture, and our single-room-dwelling family had now separated, divided-up into hundreds of sub-members, and sprawled out across town and country.

However, the story was far from over. Before we had time to lament the break-up of the close-knit family and their scattering all over terra-firma, the separation drama reached for the clouds. And when mobile joined the party, things went really crazy! As I sit here and type on my web browser, it looks like it is all happening on my lap (now, don't get any ideas, all I mean is it is happening on my laptop...), but in reality, the server sending me this page could be anywhere on earth, the database storing my words could be at the other corner of the globe, and my precious text could be merrily flying around clouds, traveling over thin air or undersea cables. It truly is mind-boggling. The single-room dwelling is now a global village. How separated is that?

But why limit our thoughts to mere earth? The farthest computer today is probably on the Voyager 1 spacecraft which is a mind-boggling 20 million kilometers away from the earth and counting, and if a client on earth were to "ping" the server on Voyager 1, it would take about 38 hrs. to come back with a response, since that is the round-trip time for light to Voyager 1! (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/) Talk about a really slow network!  So, it is not hard to imagine the day when our computing cloud would be separated across millions of miles of intergalactic space.

Well, enough about separation, it is time for my separation from this close-to-too-long post. See you soon in my next post.

No comments:

Post a Comment